Thomas Wolfe and The Old Kentucky Home, Volume 1

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'l."l--G1AS IDLFE AND THE
OW KENTUCKY HGm
Vol. I.
}o)y~
Wilson Angley
STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
Department of Cultural Resources
Raleigh 27611
December I ~ 1975
James E. Holshouser, Jr.
Governor
.Grace J. Rohrer
Secretary
LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Division of Archives and History
Larry E. Tise, Director
The attached report on the Thomas Wolfe Memor ial State Historic Site w.as
written by Mr . Wilson Angley, a candidate for the Ph . D. degree in b.ts.tory at
The University of North Carol ina. Mr . Angley worked In excess of 720 bours
on this report in the summer and fa I I of 1975. Th ~s Is to cert tfy that b.e
has complied with alI of the terms of the agreement under wnlcn the report
was compiled . It is as complete as funds and time permitted.
A word of caution is extended to the reader concerning the transcribed
documents inc luded in Appendix M. These t ranscriptions were ta ken from copies
of poor quality microfi lm. They should be compared with the orlgtnal documents.
in the Buncombe County Courthouse for accuracy.
While I think Mr . Ang ley d i d a most
doubt, additions and corrections to this
of such observations so that they may be
the report.
commendable job , there wl l I be , no
document . Please send to me coptes
includ:;;e272-J ~orical Research Supervisor
HISTORICAL RESEARCH REPORT
THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME
by
Wilson Angley
October 30, 197 5
Raleigh, North Carolina
-
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME
A. Text
B. Footnotes
C. Bibliography
II. APPENDIXES
A. List of Contents of the Old Kentucky Home prepared October 1 , 1919
B. Inventory To Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association, From the Heirs of
Thomas Wolfe and Julia E. Wolfe , As of Date , May 3, 1949
C. Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Inventory - August 13, 1974
D. List of Thomas Wo l fe's personal property on Storage at MAMMOTH
STORAGE WAREHOUSE, INC. - 410 - EAST 54th Str eet - NEW YORK CITY
E . Miscellaneous Volumes from Library of W. 0 . WOLFE
F . Books in the Wolfe Home Belonging to Various Members of the Wolfe
Family
G. Partial List of Other Boarding Houses on North Spruce Street
from 1906 to 1916
H. Selected Bibliography of Wolfe's Published Writings
I . THOMAS WOLFE HOUSE CITATIONS FROM LOOK HOMEWARD , ANGEL
J. Miscellaneous Notes on Specit~c Items
K. GeneralAssembly of North Carolina, 1973 Session , Senate Bill 1046:
"An Act Appropriating Funds for the Establishment of the Thomas
Wolfe Memorial as a State Historic Site."
L . Exhibits
M. Deeds
1. J. M. Israel toW. 0. Wolfe (1881), Buncombe County Deeds,
2.
3.
4.
5.
6 .
7.
8 .
9.
10.
11.
Book 41, pp. 371-372
E. Sluder toT. Van Gilder (1881), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 41, pp. 392-393
T. Van Gilder to E. Sluder (1882), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 41, pp . 406 - 407
E. Sluder to C. Barnard (1884), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 46, pp. 183-185
W. W. Barnard to J. H. Herring (1884), Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 46, pp. 361- 363
J. H. Herring to C. Barnard (1885), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 48, pp . 98 - 99
W. 0. Wolfe to J. Wolfe (1886), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 74, pp. 216 - 217
W. W. Barnard to A. J. Reynolds (1887), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 68 , pp . 206-208
C. V. Reynolds toT . M. Myers (1900), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 112, p. 543
T. M. Myers to J. Wolfe (1906), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 147, pp. 402-404
W. 0. Wolfe to J. R. Durrett (1920), Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 237, p. 245.
•
TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued)
12. W. 0 . Wolfe toP. R. Moale (1920), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 242, p. 244
13. J . Wolfe to H. Blomberg (1926), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 374, pp. 543-548
14. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Living Trust Agreement
15. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 377, p. 70
16. R. Kitchen to Wachovia Bank (1939), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 519, pp. 35- 36 .
17 . Wachovia Bank to H. Blomberg (1941), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 541, pp . 35 - 36
18 . H. Blomberg to J . Wolfe, et al. (1942), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 54 1 , pp. 521- 522
19. F. Wo l fe, e t a l. to J . Wolfe (1944) , Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 565, pp. 51 0 - 513
20 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949),
Buncombe County Deeds, Book 671, pp. 285 - 288
21 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949),
Bailment Agreement
22 . Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association to City of Asheville (1958),
Buncombe County Deeds, Book 798, p. 562
23. City of Asheville to State of North Carolina (1 975), Buncombe
County Deeds, Book 1114, pp. 421-424
In the old house of time and silence there is something that
creaks forever in the night, something that moves and creaks for­ever,
and that never can be still.l
And all of it is as it has always been: again, again, I turn, and
find again the things that I have always known: the cool sweet
magic of the starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of
dark, the slope, the street, the trees, the living silence of the
houses waiting, and the fact that April has come back again • • •
and again, again, in the old house I feel beneath my tread the
creak of the old stair, the worn rail , the white-washed walls, the
feel of darkness and the house asleep , and think, 'I was a child
here; here the stairs, and here the darkness; this was I, and
here is Time . ' 2
Thomas Wolfe's "house of time and silence" now commemorates the
author whose life and art it so forcibly and endurably shaped . Eventu-ally
Wolfe was to take upon himself the Herculean labor of translating
this country ' s entire experience into prose , of capturing the very es-sence
of America. Inevitably he failed to ach~evethis goal , but not be-fore
having established for himself a permanent place among the foremost
ranks of American writers, many of whose goals had also proven impossible
of attainment :
••• among his and my contemporaries, I rated Wolfe first be­cause
we had all failed, but Wolfe made the best failure because
he tried t he hardest to say the most •••• Man has but one short
life to write in, and there is so much to be said, and of course
he wants to say it all before he dies. My admiration for Wolfe
is that he tried his best to get it all said; he was willing to
throw away style, coherence, all the rules of preciseness, to
try to put all the experience of the human heart on the head of
a pin as it were . 3
But Wolfe never succeeded so well as when writing of his youth and
of growing up in Asheville. When, in his writing, he departed from the
Asheville setting and the recollections of his boyhood there, something of
vividness, cohesion , and structure was surrendered. He never quite equa led
Look Homeward, Angel, in which he poured forth the memories of his youth in
a rich lyrical p r ose, replete with vivid sensory images . In his later work
1
he returned again and again to the scenes of his youth, and when he did so
his work was the better for it:
Wolfe was a man of tremendous powers of memory; it was his chief
artistic resource. It made possible Look Homeward, Angel. But
it was also his chief limitation. When his memory failed to pro­vide
him with both the raw material and the perspective for the
work of art, the result was empty, lifeless prose.4
Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe 's editor at Scribner's and the man to whom Wolfe was
most deeply indebted as a writer, realized the crucial molding influence
of his early years:
I think no one could understand Thomas Wolfe who had not seen
or properly imagined the place in which he was born and grew up.
Asheville, N.C. is encircled by mountains . The trains wind in
and out through labyrinths of passes. A boy of Wolfe's imagina­tion
imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all
wonderful - different from what it was where there was not for
him enough of anything. . • •
• . . Wolfe was in those mountains - he tells of the train whistles
at night - the trains were winding their way out into the great
world where it seemed to the boy there was everything desirable,
and vast, and wonderful.
It was partly that which made him want to see everything, and
read everything, and say everything . S
Wolfe's youth was centered around two very different houses in Ashe-
2
ville: the one at 92 Woodfin Street where all the Wolfe children were born,
the other at 48 Spruce Street which his mother operated as a boarding house
and which Wolfe would later inunortalize as "Dixieland." Both houses were
important in shaping Wolfe's personality, character, and work. Of the first
something should be said because it exists no longer, of the second much
must be said for it now stands as a memorial to his achievements.
The Old Kentucky Home, now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, is situated on
a plot of land linked to the very beginnings of the City of Asheville. On
July 7, 1794 the prominent miller, John Burton, received a grant of land from
the State of North Carolina for some two hundred acres in Buncombe County
known as the "Town Tract." The boundaries of this original grant relate
in the following way to the present-day city: the northern boundary ex-tended
along a line from Charlotte Street, near its intersection with
Clayton Street, westward [Sondley inadvertently says eastward] along
Orange Street to a point east of Broadway [formerly North Main], thence
southward to approximately Coxe Avenue, thence eastward to the eastern
extremity of Atkin Street, and finally northward to Charlotte Street and
6 the beginning again. Thus the future Spruce Street and site of the Old
Kentucky Home were embraced within the boundaries of the original grant
to the "founder of Asheville," upon which the nucleus of the city was
constructed.
By 1840 Asheville had grown but little. The entire eastern portion of
3
the city, bounded on the west by North and South Main Streets [now Broadway
and Biltmore Avenue], on the north by Woodfin Street and on the south by
the southern boundary, boasted a mere eight residences, excluding slave
quarters . Nearly the whole of this area of about three hundred acres was
owned by James McConnell Smith, James W. Patton, Montraville Patton, Dr.
7 J. F. E. Hardy, Mrs. Rose Morrison, and Thomas L. Gaston. The immediate
vicinity of the Old Kentucky Home seems to have belonged to James McConnell
Smith and to have contained no private dwellings at all:
Beginning at the corner of Woodfin Street, Mr. J. M. Smith ran
up to the public square and back to Spruce Street and with it
to Woodfin Street, owning all in this block, upon which there
was no building save the old Buck Hotel and its belongings and
one small two room frame dwellin§ about where Mr. Jenkins' store
on North Main now [1905] stands .
James McConnell Smith was born at the future site of Asheville on
June 14, 1787, the son of Colonel Daniel S~th and Mary Davidson Smith.
I
He is believed to have been the first white child born in North Carolina
west of the Blue Ridge. In 1814 he married Mary ("Polly") Patton, daughter
of Colonel John Patton of Swannanoa. Smith throve in a nunber of business
ventures in Asheville in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth
century and was the holder of extensive lands in Asheville, Buncombe
County, and Georgia. He built and kept the old Buck Hotel, maintained a
store and tanyard, ran several farms in the Asheville area, managed a
ferry on the French Broad River, and later constructed and operated the
county's first bridge over that stream. Until his demise on May 18, 1856
at the age of sixty-eight, Smith enjoyed the status of one of Asheville's
wealthiest and most prominent citizens . 9
By 1881 the land upon which the Old Kentucky Home now stands was
owned by one Erwin Sluder, a banker. By an indenture dated October 4 of
that year Sluder and his wife, the former Julia A. Shepherd, conveyed a
4
large lot on Spruce Street to a prominent Asheville hardware merchant, Thomas
Van Gilder, for $800. 10 Almost exactly a year later, on October 3, 1882,
Sluder repurchased one half of this property from Van Gilder, leaving each
in possession of identical lots on Spruce Street measuring ninety- five by
11 one hundred and ninety feet. It is on the lot repurchased by Sluder that
the Old Kentucky Home now stands. Between Sluder's repurchase of October 3,
1882 and his subsequent sale of the property on January 13, 1884 , the pur-
12 chase price increased from $400 to $3 , 500. Almost certainly then the
original house was erected in 1883.
At the time the bouse was constructed, Asheville was a remote settle-ment
of 3,874 people, 2,408 o f whom were white, 1,466 Negro . Five general
merchandise stores c lustered about Courthouse or Public Square [now Pack
Square]. The Bank of Asheville was the city's only such institution . The
professions were represented by twenty-six attorneys, seven dentists, and
eleven physicians. There were some thirty-eight streets, usually passable.
Already Asheville accomodated its small but budding toutl$ttrade in six
modest hotels . The city's moral and religious instruction was carried on
in nine houses of worship (six white, three Negro) and in seven schools of
various description. Asheville ' s Board of Trade, the future Chamber of
13 Commerce, had been in existence scarcely a year.
By the early 1880s the stage was already being set for Asheville ' s
5
development as a major tourist and health resort. During much of the nine-teenth
century Asheville had remained a remote and almost inaccessible
mountain settlement . As early as 1795 a crude wagon road had been completed
from the south through Saluda Gap to Asheville and on to the west and Knox-
. 11 14 v1 e. A second road, dating from the early nineteenth century, proceeded
northwestward from the Public Square along North Main Street, across the
French Broad and into Tennessee. 15 These and other early roads to follow,
however, were passable to only the most stalwart, long- suffering, and deter-mined
of men. The completion then of the Buncombe Turnpike in 1827 from
Saluda northward through Asheville, Warm Springs [now Hot Springs], and
into Tennessee at Paint Rock was considered a major achievement in road-
16 building and considerably increased travel through western North Carolina.
Between the completion of the Buncombe Turnpike and the advent of the
railroads in the 1880s, prodigious droves of livestock and poultry were
driven on foot southward from Tennessee and Kentucky through Buncombe,
bound for markets in South Carolina and Georgia. Buncombites throve in
supplying feed and accomodations to the migratory hordes of men and ani-
17 mals. They would soon turn their endeavors toward a more refined clientele.
6
Since soon after the turn of the nineteenth century , a trickle of
summer visitors had begun to make their way from South Carolina and Geor-gia
to the Asheville and Warm Springs areas in search of comfort and
recreation. By 1820 Asheville was also gaining celebrity as a health
resort , particularly for consumptives. The numbers of both the vaca-tioners
and the migrant ailing were swelled appreciably by completion
f h B b T . k 18 o t e uncom e urnp~ e.
It was the advent of rail travel in the 1880s, however, which enabled
Asheville to become a major resort and health center . At the close of the
Civil War, Asheville had stood sixty miles distant from railheads in Morgan-ton,
North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, and Greeneville, Tennessee.
The long-delayed Western North Carolina Railroad from Salisbury through
Statesville, Morganton, and Old Fort, finally broke through to Asheville in
1880. Connections with the south followed in 1886 with the completion of
19 the Asheville-Spartanburg line. Among other developments, the opening
of the Battery Park Hotel in 1886 and the completion of George W. Vander-built's
palacial Biltmore House in 1895 signaled Asheville's triumphant ar-rival
on the social and financial scene, and set in motion forces of growth
and change which would not spend themselves until the late 1920s.
Several of those associated with the future Old Kentucky Home played
significant parts in laying the financial and mercantile foundations for a
growing Asheville; others, like Julia E. Wo l fe, who followed them, opened
its doors to the rapidly increasing numbers flocking to Asheville in search
of health and recreation . Among the former was Erwin Sluder, the man who
erected the original house on Spruce Stre~t . His gravestone in Asheville~s
Riverside Cemetery indicates that he lived from 1824 to 1885. By the time
of the housets construction he had long since established himself as one of
western North Carolina\s lead~g p~~y~te bankers, haying set up for busi-
20 ness on the Public Square soon after the Civil war. The Census of 1880
listed Sluder as a banker, age fifty-six , with four children. Listed as
members of his household were, besides his immediate family, a niece, two
21 boarders (a teacher and a dentist), and two servants. In 1884 he took
as his partner W. W. Barnar d . 22 Barnard was Sluder ' s son- in-law , the
husband of his eldest child Cordelia (Cordie) . 23
On January 13, 1884 Sluder sold the property on Spruce Street to his
24 daughter and son-in-law for $3,500. Apparently, however, the couple had
been living in the house since its completion, as indicated by Asheville's
first City Directory, published in October of 1883. 25 Erwin Sluder's resi­dence
, on the other hand, was given as North Main Street in 1883. 26 Very
probably Sluder never resided in the house he had built. By 1883 he was a
prominent Asheville citizen in the fifty-ninth year of his age with a well
established household; his daughter, Cordie, according to the Census of
1880, would have been nineteen the year the house was built; and it was the
Barnards , not the Sluder s, who were listed as residents of Spruce Street
in 1883. It is reasonable to suppose , then, that the house was built for
the newly married couple by Erwin Sluder and sold to them the following
January shortly before his death.
7
W. W. Barnard (1858-1944) 27 was a leading buyer and warehouseman during
Asheville's thriving tobacco marketing period in the 1880s. 28 Having been
made a partner in his father-in-law's banking concern in 1884, he continued
to prosper in that profession after Sluder ' s death the following year . By
1890 he had risen to the vice-presidency of the National Bank of Asheville,
and from 1892 to 1896 served as president of that bank. 29 Barnard and his
wife possessed the property until April 1: 1884, when, for some reason,
30 they sold the house to one J. H. Herring for $3,600. Of Herring little
can be learned except that in 1887 he was carrying on a trade in shoes and
boots in the Herring and Weaver Shoe Store at 30 South Main Street . 31
After less than a year, on March 14, 1885, Herring relinquished the house
32 to Cordie Barnard for $3,390 . By 1890 Herring vanished from the city
directories, presumably having died or moved away.
From March 14, 1885 until July 13, 1889 the house remained in the
Barnards' hands. The City Directory of 1887 indicates that, after the
death of Erwin Sluder, several members of his family moved into the Spruce
33 Street house with the Barnards. The next change of ownership came with
the Barnards' sale of the house to Mrs. Alice Johnston Reynolds, a
widow, on July 13, 1889 for the muchincreased purchase price of $7,500. 34
It should be noted that the original house had apparently seen a massive
addition during the period of the Barnards' residence, the price of the
house having more than doubled between 1885 and 1889.
It was during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership that the house
definitely began to be operated as a boarding house . Within one year
after her purchase, the City Directory of 1890, in the classified ads,
listed the residence as a boarding house '~y permission . " 35 Under Mrs.
Reynolds' personal proprietorship and that of others to whom she apparently
leased the house, 48 Spruce Street took in boarders from 1890 to 1900. An
1893 information booklet for the promotion of tourism contained a glowing
advertisement for Mrs. Reynolds' boarding house. 36 Three years later,
though still referred to as the Reynolds, the house was accepting board-ers
under the proprietorship of Mrs. Leah I. Drake, whose advertise-
8
•
ment was inserted in the City Directory of 1896. 37 Subsequent proprietors
during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership were Mrs. W. 0 . Hudson in
189938 and Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth in 1900.
39
By July of 1900 Mrs. Reynolds had died·; her brother, Dr . Carl V.
Reynolds, acting in the capacity of executor of her estate, sold the
house on the twenty seventh day of that month to the Reverend Thomas M.
40 Myers and his long-suffering wife, Mary, for $5,000. At the ti.me of this
transaction, Dr. Reynolds was carrying on his medical practice in the
Barnard Building in Asheville. 41 He subsequently went on to distinguish
42
himself in the practice of medicine on both the local and state levels.
The Reverend T. M. Myers, from whom Julia Wolfe was to purchase the
Old Kentucky Home, seems to have been a colorful and restless man with
more than three decades in the service of God to his credit . Re was,
however, flawed by a propensity for strong drink and by a dubious mental
constitution, at least in his declining years . Mrs. Wolfe later recalled
that he was
A man from Kentucky . He was a lecturer , a Campbellite preacher
[he is sometimes remembered, with less likelihood , as having
been a Methodist], and a very brainy man at one time, but he 43
snapped several times they said, and had to go to an institution.
In August of 1898, two years before his purchase of the Spruce Street
property, the Reverend Myers purchased a large farm near Asheville which he
dubbed the "Old Kentucky Home," the name he would soon after confer on the
boarding house. 44 For reasons best known to himself, Foster A. Sondley re-corded
the Reverend Myers' undistinguished exclamation alone, of all those
9
which must have found voice on that day in 1887, when Asheville's first elec-tric
street railway car lurched forward, aided by neither animal nor steam
power, on its maiden journey from the Public Square southward to Biltmore. 45
Wolfe later drew the Reverend Myers' portrait as the "Reverend Wellington
Hodge" in Look Homeward, Angel, making mention of some of the haunting memo-ries
which Myers had of the Old Kentucky Home and which helped motivate his
sale of the house to Mrs. Wolfe. 46 The Old Kentucky Home was operated by
several proprietors during the six years of Myers" ownership. In 1900, the
year of Myers' purchase of the house and the year of Thomas Wolfe's birth,
10
the proprietor was Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth. 47
In August of 1902 Myers leased
the house to one C. J. Jeffress for $900 with an option to buy.48 In 1904
Edward T. and Mary B. Green were acting as proprietors; 49 and in 1906, the
year of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase, Thomas W. and Elsie C. King kept the house
for boarders. 50
For more than two decades after the construction of their future house
on Spruce Street, the Wolfe residence was located a short distance away at
92 Woodfin Street. Some account must be given of the Woodfin Street house,
for it was there that all of the Wolfe children were born, it was there that
the Wolfes' family life most nearly approached congeniality and cohesiveness,
and it was there that Thomas Wolfe's fondest memories of childhood originated.
The man who was to build the Woodfin Street house with his own hands,
William Oliver Wolfe, was born near York Springs, Pennsylvania on April 10,
1851, the son of Jacob Wolf (W. 0. later added the "e") and the former
Eleanor Jane Heikes (or Heikus). Shortly after the Civil War, he had struck
out for Baltimore, where he had found employment with Sisson and King's
Monument Works. During the years of his apprenticeship, Wolfe lived in a
Baltimore boarding house, the Streeter Hotel, from whose irascible proprietor,
Joe Streeter, he may have acquired some of his relishment for the hyperbolic,
the dramatic, and the profane. Upon completion of his apprenticeship in
Baltimore, the stone cutter came south with his younger brother, Elmer,
to work on the column friezes of the capitol building in Columbia, South
Carolina. In something under a year, the work completed, the two
moved northward to Raleigh, where they applied their craft to the con­struction
of the state insane asylum and other buildings currently under
way. By 1871 his brother Elmer had departed for Ohio, and W. 0. Wolfe
had established his own place of business in Raleigh at the corner of
South Blount and East Morgan Streets. On October 9, 1873, the twenty- two
year old Wolfe and a nineteen year old Raleigh girl, Hattie Watson, were
joined in wedlock. Of this, the first of Wolfets three ill-fated marriages,
little can be learned, save that it soon ended in divorce .
In 1879 Wolfe married Cynthia Hill, the daughter of his landlady and
eight years his senior. Shortly thereafter, during theLr first year of
marriage, Cynthia's worsening tubercular condition resolved the couple to
leave Raleigh and take up residence in Asheville. Arriving in Asheville
some time before her husband, Cynthia Wolfe set up as a milliner. W. 0.
51 followed as soon as his business affairs in Raleigh were settled.
The Census of 1880, besides W. 0 . and Cythia Wolfe, lists his mother-in-
law, Mrs. Allen, his brother Wesley, a plasterer, and one Negro servant
as members of theW. 0. Wolfe household. 52 Julia Wolfe would later recall
that W. 0. and Cynthia Wolfe had lived briefly in two rented rooms on
North Main Street before construction of the Woodfin Street house. 53 The
information in the Census of 1880, however, indicates that larger quarters
must have been occupied at that ttme.
In any event, W. 0 . and Cynthia Wolfe seem to have been unable to
11
•
locate a house which suited them, and decided to purchase a piece of land
and erect their own house . On October 10, 1881 W. 0. Wolfe purchased the
lot on Woodfin Street from J. M. and S. E. Israel for $300. 54 With the
help of several men whom he had hired, Wolfe completed the building of
the house soon after purchase of the land. But Cynthia Wolfe's health
did not improve as hoped. After less than three years in the house her
husband had built for her, she passed away on February 22, 1884. 55
During the brief period that Cynthia Wolfe operated her millinery
shop in Asheville , she bacame acquainted with Julia Elizabeth Westall,
the future Julia E. Wolfe. Indeed, it was in Cynthia ' s shop that the
future marriage partners first met. Sometime thereafter, probably in
the summer of 1884, a more serious acquaintance was set on foot when the
redoubtable stone cutter was accosted in his shop by Miss Westall, a
school teacher and part- time bookseller, in search of a new customer.
Julia E. Westall had been born at Swannanoa in 1860, the product of
Major Thomas Casey Westall's second marriage . She was almost entirely
self-educated in her early youth, having received little or no formal
schooling on the primary and secondary levels. After a year and a
half's attendance at Asheville Female College and Judson College in
Hendersonville, she was able to establish herself as a rural school
teacher in Yancey and later Mitchell counties 9 and supplemented her
income by selling books during the summer . 56
Thus the union which would one day produce one of America~s great
novelists was begun on a basis of buying, selling, lending, and discussing
books. Mrs. Wolfe later recalled that her future husband had initiated
his proposal, in the parlor of the Woodfin Street house, by explaining
12
•
13
that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Allen, was soon to return to Raleigh and that
he was therefore obliged either to remarry or break up housekeeping for
want of assistance. Wolfe's pragmatic solution was not immediately accepted,
but at length his presumption and persistence won her over. On January 14,
1885, at the home of the bride's father, the two were joined in holy matri-
57 mony. It was to prove , as Andrew Turnbull so aptly described it, "an
epic misalliance."58
A numerous progeny soon began to issue forth. The first child, Leslie,
a girl who died in infancy , was born October 18, 1885, only nine months and
four days after the wedding. Seven other children and numerous miscarriages
followed, all placing in extreme jeopardy the allegation of impotency report-
59 edly leveled at W. 0. Wolfe by his first wife, Hattie Watson. Like
Lesl ie before them, all the Wolfe children were born in Julia Wolfe's
upstairs bedroom at the front of the house: Effie on June 7, 1887, Frank
on November 25, 1888, Mabel on September 25, 1890, the twins--Grover and
Benjamin--on October 27 , 1892, Fred on July 15, 1894, and Thomas Clayton
on October 3, 190o. 60
It was in the Woodfin Street rather than the Spruce Street house that
Mrs. Wolfe prepared the sumptuous breakfasts and W. 0. prepared the Satanic
fir es described with such nostalgic vigor by his youngest child:
1--;
Of, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there! To feel the
fire full chimney- throat roar up a - tremble with the blast of his
terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen
range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of
breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed ! Oh,
to hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous
hoarse frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous mutter­ing
mounting to faint howls as with infuriating relish he prepared
the roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him mutter­ing
as the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him
growling as savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimney­throat,
to hear his giant stride racing through the house pre­pared
now, storming to the charge , and the well-remembered howl
of his awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the backroom stairs he flung it open, yelling at them to awake . 61
Only occasionally in later years would he ignite a conflagration in the
Old Kentucky Home sufficient to kindle memories of his previous efforts . 62
It was in emulation of her absent father that Effie came near to
burning the Woodfin Street house to the ground. In the late 1890s the
restless and "far-wandering" W. 0. Wolfe had left Asheville for a three-month
jaunt to California. Mrs. Wolfe had gone downtown to her husband ' s
place of business, having left Effie charged with the responsibility of
keeping a low fire burning in the kitchen range. Following her father's
examples , she doused the slackening flame with a can of kerosine, drawn
from the drum on the back porch. The ensuing blaze badly damaged the
rear of the house on both £loors and , for a while, bade fare to destroy
the entire structure. The frugal and enterprising Mrs. Wolfe set carpen-ters
to the task of rebuilding almost at once. With the help of her
brothers, W. H. and J. M. Westall (both in the building supply and con-struction
business) the work was completed according to the original plan
in a matter of weeks. W. 0. Wolfe was told nothing of the incident until
his return to Asheville. 63
Mrs. Wolfe, in fact, had not had her husband's house repaired, but
her own . Ironically , the house referred to as "Papa's house" or in Thomas
Wolfe ' s writings as "Gant's house," had been purchased by Mrs. Wolfe from
her husband on October 26, 1886 for $2,000. 64 Moreover, it appears that
Mrs. Wolfe took some few boarders into the house the summer of 1886, fol­lowing
the death of their first child.65 Happily this precedent was not
followed thereafter in the Woodfin Street house; but it can be seen as a
harbinger of things to come eighteen years later with Mrs. Wolfe~s boarding
14
•
house venture in St. Louis and twenty years later with the purchase of
the Old Kentucky Home.
The Woodfin Street home was a well-constructed two- story structure of
seven rooms. It was said to be the first house in Asheville with a "ce­ment
finish, " a finish designed to simulate brownstone. A large front
porch, high off the ground, stretched across the front and down both sides
of the house. Beneath the house was a dirt- floored cellar used for the
storage of fruits and vegetables. The first floor contained four rooms,
including the kitchen. As one entered the downstairs hall from the front
porch, the parlor was on the right . It contained a suit of upholstered
furniture, a what-not filled with shells, curios, and carved marble, a
mantel piece adorned by figurines, and a marble top table , above which
15
was suspended a pull-down crystal lamp. The floor of the parlor was covered
with a tan Belgian carpet decorated with gold and pink rose clusters. In
the ceiling of the parlor and the hallway were medallions fashioned by
W. 0. Wolfe. To the rear of the parlor was the living room, which had
been originally a bedroom. A side door opened from the living room onto
the side porch. Across the hall, opposite the parlor, was the dining
room, which contained a long extendable table capable of seating fourteen
people. Behind the dining room was the kitchen where the fondly remem-bered
Woodfin Street meals were prepared. Upstairs were three bedrooms .
Mrs. Wolfe' s stood over the parlor at the front of the house . Mr. Wolfets
room was opposite hers, across the small hallway. The childrents room was
on the right rear of the house above the living room. A staircase evi­dently
led down from the children~s room to the back porch. The house was
heated entirely by four fireplaces, one in each of the three rooms downstairs,
excluding the kitchen, and the fourth in Mrs. Wolfets bedroom upstairs .
The house contained no plumbing. 66
The front yard on Woodfin Street was small but verdant. Steps led
down from the lofty front porch to a marble walkway, which spanned the
short distance of about thirty feet from the foot of the steps to the
wood and later iron fence. The front yard was fifty feet in width and
was heavily planted in a variety of flowers and shrubs . As a general
rule the children were not allowed to play in the front yard, but the
spacious back yard afforded ample opportunity for play. Although only
fifty feet wide, the back yard ran back more than two hundred and fifty
feet from the street and featured a variety of fruit trees, a vegetable
garden, and a swing for the children.
A further attraction of the back yard on Woodfin Street was the one
room playhouse which now stands to the left rear of the Old Kentucky Home.
The playhouse was built by W. 0. Wolfe with pine lumber about the turn
of the century, and was placed behind the right rear or northeast corner
67
of the main house. A plank walkway led from the front of the main house
to the doorway of the playhouse. The younger children spent many hours
there, especially during inclement weather or on Sunday afternoons when
W. 0. Wolfe craved surcease of noise within the main hous·e. The play-house
contained chairs, a couch., a stove, an atlas, a large blackboard,
and Mrs. Wolfe ' s old Estey organ, which she had obtained before her mar-riage
while teaching school in Mitchell County. Tom especially enjoyed
the playhouse, seeking there the solitude denied ~ elsewhere. When stay-
16
ing on Woodfin Street the children could jump from the window of the back
bedroom onto the roof of the playhouse and from there to the ground below. 68
The Woodfin Street house was situated between the J . M. Israels ' modest
house on the west and the grand brick house of the E. W. Hazzards on the
east. It was in the driveway of the Hazzards house that the young Thomas
69 Wolfe was near ly run over and killed by a horse and delivery wagon. But
more than a driveway separated the Wolfe's from the Razzards; the two fami-lies
lived on different planes. The Hazzards were a wealthy South Carolina
17
family from near Charleston. Normally they rented the house to others while
living elsewhere. For several years during Wolfe's early youth the house
was occupied by the Oliver Cromwell famil y of Philadelphia, which had come
to Asheville for Mr. Cromwell ' s failing health. The three Cromwell child-ren
were frequent playmates for the younger Wolfe children. James Cromwell
would one day marry Doris Duke, and his sister Louise was to become the
70 fir st wife of Douglas MacArthur. The young Thomas Wolfe's c losest friends
on Woodfin Street were Charles Perkinson, son of the T. J. Perk.insons across
the street and Max Israel, son of the J . M. Israels next door . Though
turbulent even in the early years, Wolfe's childhood was at its best
on Woodfin Street.
Julia Wolfe, however, was never entirely at ease on Woodfin Street .
There she was constantly reminded, at times by W. 0 . Wolfe in no uncertain
terms, that the house had been built for another woman . Indeed, some of
the furniture and bric- a-brac in the house had been brought by Cynthia Hill
from Raleigh. W. 0 . Wolfe may have promised to build a house for his new
wife on a large lot he had acquired on Merriman Avenue; if so , the promise
71 was never kept. Julia Wolfe had ample cause for discontent~ent under
her husband's roof , besides the c onstant reminders of his former marriage.
In real life W. 0. Wolfe was a physically imposing, rather impeccable,
man of six feet four inches, with a decided proclivity for oratory, hyper-bole,
and genial profanity . There was about him a feeling of zestful
restlessness, unpredictable expansiveness, and undifferentiated frus ­tration.
Had he chosen another path, he might well have made his mark
as an actor or lawyer. Though lacking in formal education, he had ac­quired
an appreciation of cultural and intellectual pursuits. A man of
gifted memory, Wolfe indulged his flair for the dramatic with long pas­sages
of poetry and scripture. In many ways he was an appealing and
colorful man . But his periodic drunkeness and riotous adultery , together
with occasional threats of physical violence against his wife and her to·o
numerous offspring were, for Mrs. Wolfe, recurring causes of embarrass­ment,
degradation, and anxiety.
For his part, the Olympian W. 0 . Wolfe could not abide his wife ' s
small mindedness, her unpleasant and frenetic mannerism of speech and
gesture, her growing acquisitiveness, her inchoate mysticism, her petty
selfishness, and her suffocating niggardliness. Moreover, Mrs. Wolfe was
of a fiercely self-reliant nature, and, under the circumstances, fostered
a desire to assert her indpendence. At length the unhappy un.ion was to be
severed in such a way as to allow Mrs. Wolfe an opportunity both to flee
her husband's hearth and give vent to her mounting mania for real estate
speculation.
The eventual purchase of the Old Kentucky Home and the consequent
destruction of a cohesive family life should be seen against the back­ground
of both the growing gulf between the ill-mated marriage partners
and Asheville ' s mushrooming growth as a tourist and health resort. By
18
the early years of this century Asheville was attracting thousands in search
of health and recreation . Asheville was becoming a town on the make, and
had begun the transformation which its most famous son would later deplore:
New people were coming to town all the time, new faces were
being seen upon the streets. There was quite a general feeling
in the air that g r eat events were just around the corner, and
that a bright destiny was in store for Libya Rill.
It was a time when they were just hatching from the shel l ,
when the place was changing from a little isolated mountain
village, lost to the world, with its few thousand native population,
to a briskly moving modern town, with railway connections to all
parts, and with a growing population of wealthy people who had
heard about the beauties of the setting and were coming there to
live.72
Hotels and boar ding houses were rapidly proliferating to meet the
growing demand for accomodations. As early as 1898 the Ashevill e Board
of Trade was promoting tourism and describing the boarding houses of
the area in glowing terms :
Scores of home - like boarding houses are here; excellent modern
f l ats and beautiful private residences, occupied by r efined,
cultured people, many of whom are persons of wealth.73
19
By about 1910 the Board of Trade was claiming nineteen hotels for Asheville
with rates ranging from $1 . 00 to $6.00 a day, in addition to the "scores
of homelike boarding houses [which] offer choice accomodations at from
$6 . 00 to 14 . 00 per week."74 It was estimated at this time that " The hotel
and boarding house capacity approaches an aggregate of 12,000 to 15,000 ."75
By 1920 , the effective end of Thomas Wolfe's life in Asheville, the Board
of Trade was advertising hotel rates from $2.50 to $10 . 00 a day and up ,
while boarding houses were said to offer room and board ranging from
76 $15.00 to $25.00 a week. Accomodations at the Old Kentucky Home we r e
never to fetch such a price.
Julia Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home was preceded by
experience as a boarding house keeper during the summer of 1904 at the
St. Louis World's Fair. According to one of Mrs. Wolfe's accounts, the
initiative for her undertaking the St . Louis venture had come in part
from her husband. By this account, Mr. Wolfe had taken the Keeley Cure
•
for alcoholism about 1901 and for several years had been ab l e to control
his drinking. Yet he had grown increasingly restive beneath the burden
of his large family and had encouraged his wife to bring in some additional
income. This, she later claimed, had been an important factor in her de­cision.
A further inducement for Mrs. Wolfe, according to one account,
was the reported success enjoyed by Governor Elias Carr's sister as a
boarding house keeper during the Chicago Worldls Fair of 1893. 77
In the spring of 1904 Mrs. Wolfe journeyed to St. Louis with all of
the children except Frank and Effie, who remained in Asheville with their
father . She had taken a six-month lease on the house of Dr. Paul Paquin
of St . Louis, who was to be out of town for a year and whose brother, also
a physician, Mrs . Wolfe was acquainted with in Asheville. The house was
located at 5095 Fairmont Avenue, on the corner of Fairmont and Academy
Street. Until November Mrs. Wolfe operated the residence as the North
Carolina House for those visiting the World•s Fair. Many of her tenants ·
were North Carolinians. Her otherwise profitable St . Louis venture was
marred and terminated by the death of Grover there on November 16. Upon
notification of the boy's death, W. 0. Wolfe came out to St. Louis and
the family returned to Asheville with the body . The death of Grover,
like the death of Ben fourteen years later, left a definite mark on the
life of the Wolfe family. From time to time in subsequent years, W. 0.
Wolfe would denounce his wife's St. Louis enterprise, holding her respon­sible
for the death of the boy whom both regarded as the brightest and
most promising of the children. 78
The death of Grover and the subsequent recriminations placed further
strains on Julia Wolfe's tolerance for the Woodfin Street house and
20
•
79 helped assure her permanent departure . Soon after the family ' s return
from St. Louis, Mrs. Wolfe began looking for a likely boarding house in-vestment.
Late in the summer of 1906 one Jack Campbell, a real estate
agent, came by the house on Woodfin Street to inform Mrs. Wolfe of the
house which the Reverend Myers was placing on the market. After being
shown through the house by Mrs. Myers, Julia Wolfe approached her husband
on its purchase. The harassed W. 0. Wolfe seems to have acquiesed in a
spirit of resignation and perhaps relief: uJack, she wants it, make the
papers out to her. 80 If she is satisfied , I dontt care. " According to
Mrs. Wolfe's recollections, the papers for transfer of ownership were
drawn up and signed the following. day in the offices of the law firm of
Bernard and Bernard . At the time of the purchase, the house already con­tained
nineteen boarders paying $8 . 00 a week. 81 The Reverend Myers had
21
already dubbed the house the Old Kentucky Home, in honor of his home state,
82 and requested that the name be retained. Only occasionally, during the
temporary proprietorship of short-term lessees, was the name ever changed
ther eafter.
The deed of August 30, 1906 conveyed ownership of the Old Kentucky
Home to Julia E. Wolfe for a purchase price of $6,500 . The property was
described as being free of all encumbrances "excepting certain unpaid
paving and sewer assessments," for work that had been recently done and
f h . h M W lf d .hili 83 f $2 000 or w 1c r s . o e assume respons1 ty. A down payment o ,
was required. By this time Mrs. Wolfe had accumulated $1,700 for the
purchase of a boarding house, including the profit of about $500 from
the summer in St. Louis. The balance was to be paid off at a rate of
$500 every six months . W. 0. Wolfe was prevailed upon to lend hts wife
the balance of the money down required, and, in l ess than a week after
84 the sale, she took actual possession of the house.
•
22
Quietly but decisively the family had been cleft in twain. There-after
its members were to shuttle for many years between two houses,
neither of which was a home. At first and briefly, Mrs. ~olfe exerted
some effort to operate her newly acquired business while remaining on
Woodfin Street, walking back and forth between the two houses in the early
morning before breakfast and late evening after supper. The family adapted
to this arrangement after a fashion by taking their lunches and suppers at
the Old Kentucky Home. After only about six weeks of commuting between
the two houses, Mrs . Wolfe was afflicted with a seriously infected leg
and began to sleep in the boarding house. For some weeks she was obliged
to conduct her boarding house business from a wheel chair; but she did
not return again to Woodfin Street and her husband. Thus, from about
October of 1906 the family bonds were permanently severed. Mrs . Wolfe
later claimed that, at first, her husband did not seem to mind her living
apart and had even seemed to relish his intercourse with the boarders.
If this is true, his attitude altered quickly and permanently, as she
later owned :
But as time went on he declared that I had made a mistake in
breaking up the home which I admit was true, scattering the
family, trying to live in two houses.85
For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home,
the children drifted back and forth between the two houses, depending on
whim, domestic circumstances, and the tourist season. A study of the Ashe-ville
city directories for the years 1906 to 1918 unfolds a bewildering and
frenetic alteration of living arrangements, remarkable for a single family.
Family correspondence of the period reveals a similar picture. Addresses
changed irregularly with the years and seasons, and it was not unusual for
members of the family, writing from out of town, to express uncertainty as
to where the various family members were currently to be found.
23
The chief source of information for Thomas Wolfets youth and for life
within the Old Kentucky Home must, of course, be Look Homeward 1 Angel. Des -
pite Wolfe's disingenuous evasiveness on the point and the recurring dis-claimers
of other family members, the novel's depiction of people, places,
and events is remarkable for its accuracy and detail. Wolfe was very tender
to the accusation that he was merely transcribing actual memories into prose ,
feeling that such an admission would seriously undermine and diminish his
role as a creative and imaginative artist. But one thing after another from
the book can be or has been verified. The experiences of Wolfe's protago-nist,
Eugene Gant, and of Wolfe himself are, on the whole, virtually iden-
86 tical. Drawing on his prodigiously retentive memory, Wolfe was able to
translate the recollections of his youth with amazing vividness and detail:
We Wolfes, Papa and Mama and each of us children, I think, have
all been possessed of extraordinary powers of remembering. Much
of Tom's success as a writer, in my opinion , is attributable to
the fact that he never forgot anything •.•• he could sit down and
recall in elaborate detail those things he had experienced, what
he had seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt, and put them
realistically on paper. Tom's was truly a photographic memory. 87
In a letter to his mother from Harvar d, written three years before he
began Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe wrote that he had some memories of
childhood before Grover ' s death in 1904, but that after that time he was
able to trace his childhood in memory "step by step. " 88 Thirteen years
later, in The Story of a Novel, Wolfe alluded to the potentials of his
memory as a resoruce for his art:
The quality of my memory is characterized, I believe, in
a more than ordinary degree by the intensity of its sense im­pressions,
its powers to evoke and bring back the odors, sounds,
colors, shapes, and feel of things with concrete vividness.89
MOreover, Wolfe's powe r s of recalling the surroundings of his youth were
matched by his ability to recollect the faces, characteristics, and
personalities which filled thefuJ
• • • the winter boarders in a little boarding house down south
twenty years ago; Miss Florrie Mangle, the trained nurse; Miss
Jessie Rimmer, the cashier at Reeds drug store; Doctor Richards,
the clairvoyant; the pretty girl who cracked the whip and thrust
her head into the lion's mouth with Johnny J. Jones Carnival and
Combined Shows . 90
Serious students of Wolfe's life and work have found Wolfets auto-biographical
fiction approached literal truth most closely in Look Home-war
d, Angel . Elizabeth Nowell, long personally and professionally asso-ciated
with Wolfe and his most comprehensive biographer , used Look Home -
wa r d, Angel as the chief source of information for his early life , because
91 it was " so obviously autobiographical." His second and final editor ,
Edward Aswell of Harper's, declared the nove l "The most literall y auto-biographical
of his books. Nine years after Wolfe ' s death,
Maxwell Perkins of Scribner ' s, the man responsible for the publication
of Wolfe's first and best novel, recalled his initial recognition of its
factual basis :
I remember the horror with which I realized, when working with
Thomas Wolfe on his manuscript of ''The Angel, t• that all of these
people were almost completely r eal, that the book was liter all y
autobiographical.93
One Wolfe schol ar familiar with the events and sur roundings of his child-hood
has concluded that:
There are many more than 300 characters and places mentioned
by name or described in Look Homeward , Angel, and prob ab ly there
is not an entirely fict itious person, place , or incident in t he
whole novel. • • • Those migrant boarders a nd tourists who came
to the Old Kentucky Home, rocked on the front porch for a spell ,
and moved on are seldom identifiable. Wolfe remembered them,
but townspeople do not; and the minor exploits of boarders are
rarel y recorded by the papers.94
It was because of the penetrating and scathing accuracy of Wolfe ' s
portrait of Asheville that Look Homeward, Angel evoked such widespread
furor. Two decades of the town's history had been vivisected and
24
placed on display before the world; the town would not soon forgive the
apostate son who climbed the pinnacle of literary fame by flaying the
95 place of his birth. Wolfe ' s sister, Mabel, a resident of Ashevil le at
the time of the book's publication, recalled the vehemence of the city's
reaction :
The only thing, I felt, that saved us Wolfes from being
tarred and feathered was the fact that Tom had not spared us .
He had lambasted the neighbors, but he had pictured his own
family also, the community agreed, in no flattering light.96
A shudder ran through the mortified city as residents recognized them·
selves and acquaintances vividly portrayed in the pages of the book.
With only slight exaggeration, Thomas Wolfe described Asheville ' s feel-ings
t-e\.rard him in his account of "Libyan Hill ts" reaction to the pub -
lication of George Webber ' s first novel, "Home to Our Mountains":
'I have spent most of my time this past week, ' George
wrote, 'reading and rereading all the letters that my erstwhile
friends and neighbors have written me since the book came out.
And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote
is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have
been variously compa r ed to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and
Caesar's Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its
own nest , to a viper that an inocent populace had long nurtured
to its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones
of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom
nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honored dead. I
have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog deliberately and lust­fully
wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood , a rattle­snake,
a jackass , an alleycat, and a baboon ••• there have been
moments when I felt that maybe my accusers are right. • 97
In spite of his protestations of artistic integrity and wounded
innocence, Wolfe had in fact anticipated a harsh reaction by Asheville .
His notebooks clearly reveal that he had even drafted various defenses
98 against the expected onslaught before publication of the novel. Almost
certainly, however, he was astonished and dismayed by the pitch and ex-tent
of the uproar and by the agonizing slowness with which the hometown
J;esentment against him waned:
25
I had thought that there might be a hundred people in that
town who would read the book, but if there were a hundred
outside of the negr o population, the blind , and the positively
illiterate who did not read it, I do not know where they are.
For months the town seethed with a fury of resentment which
I had not believed possible.99
In the early and mid 1920s, during his first years away from Asheville,
Wolfe had been wont to see himself as the sensitive and unappreciated
artist in exile; he now found himself repudiated, disavowed, and held
in contempt by the city upon which he had previously cast his scorn.
He had hoped to prove himself to Asheville as a poet and genius, and
the city ' s rejection of him was profound diappointment. 100
At length a more mature Wolfe came to regret having given so little
quarter and not having considered the potential consequences of his book
more carefully:
I had written the book, more or less, directly from the experi­ence
of my own life, and, furthermore, I now think that I may have
written it with a certain naked intensity of spirit which is
likely to characterize the earliest work of a young writer.lOl
. . • the young writer is often led through inexperience to a use
of the materials of life which are, perhaps, somewhat too naked and
direct for the purpose of a work of art. The thing a young writer
is likely to do is to confuse the limits between actuality and
reality. He tends unconsciously to describe an event in such a way
because it actually happened that way, and from an artistic point
of view, I can now see that this is wrong. It is not, for example,
important that one remembers a beautiful woman of easy virtue as
having come from the state of Kentucky in the year 1907. She could
perfectly well have come from Idaho or Texas or Nova Scotia. The
important thing really is only to express as well as possible the
character and quality of the beautiful woman of easy virtue.l02
And so it is with some caution and much confidence one can turn to
Look Homeward, Angel for a more or less accurate representation of the
crucial role played by the Old Kentucky Home in Wolfe's youth and in
the life of the family as a whole:
26
In the young autumn when th.e maples were still full and
green •• • Eliza moved into Dixieland. There was a clangor,
excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the purchase, but
no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant and Eliza,
although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive boundary
in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of Dixie­land
evasively as 'a good investment, ' said nothing clearly. In
fact they felt their approaching separation instinctively: Eliza's
life was moving by a half-blind but inevitable gravitation toward
the centre of its desire - the exact meaning of her venture she
would have been unable to define, but she had a deep conviction
that the groping urge which had led her so blindly into death and
misery at Saint Louis had now impelled her in the right direction.
Her life was on its rails.
And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached
this complete disruption of their life together , the rooting up
of their clamerous home, when the hour of departures came, the103 elements resolved themselves immutably and without hesitation.
Family life on Woodfin Street had been tur bulent and at times trau-matic,
especially when W. 0. Wolfe embarked on his periodic and protracted
drinking bouts and gave vent to his manifold frustrations. But, on the
whole, life had been reasonably cohesive and pleasant, even though a
permanent tension had already settled between W. 0. and Julia Wolfe.
By the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, Frank
("Steve") had already taken up his drink-sodden and vagabond existence;
he descended on Asheville now only at irregular intervals, drifting in
and out of family life in the two houses. 104 Effie's ("Daisy's") marri-age
was not quite, as Wolfe writes, "growing near" at the time of pur­chase.
105 She was not to marry Fred Gambrell until September 16, 1908. 106
During the interim she remained with Mabel and their father on Woodfin
Street. 107 Leslie , the first child, h.ad by this time been dead for twenty
years. Grover had died in St . Louis two years before the purchase . Tom
was dragged umbilically to Spruce Street by his mother:
27
Eliza took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that
bound her to all the weary life of breast and cradle; he still
slept with her of nights; she was like some swimmer who ventures
out into a dark and desperate sea, not wholly trusting to her
strength and destiny, but with a slender cord bound to her which
stretches still to land .l08
Ben and Fred ("Luke") were, as in Look Homeward, Angel, "left floating
109 in limbo," drifting uncertainly between the two houses.
W. 0. Wolfe's celebrated views of the Old Kentucky Home and of
boarding house life are only slightly exaggerated and caricatured in
the novel as those of ''W. 0. Gant":
Gant had already named it ' The Bam t; in the morning now,
after his heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntl y toward
town by way of Spring Street, composing en route the invective
that he had formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would
stride through the wide ch.ill hall of Dix.ieland, busting in upon
Eliza, and two or three of the negresses, busy preparing the
morning meal for the hungry boarders who rocked energetically
upon the porch. All of the objections, all of the abuse that
had not been uttered when she bought the place, were vented
now.
''Woman, you have deserted my bed and board , you have made a
laughing stock out of me before the world, and left your cflildren
to perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would
not do to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted
me in my old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It
was a bitter day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell
upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn.
There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it
will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even
your own brothers will come near you. 'Nor beast, nor man hath
fallen so far.' "llO
With less bombast, in a letter to Tom in 1917, the actual W. 0 . Wolfe ex-pressed
his feelings toward the boarding house with simple and terse
eloquence: " There are few at O.K.H. It would be much better if none were
th ,111 ere. From time to time the exercised w. 0. Wolfe must have inveighed
against the IllOtley array of character s which inevitably found their way to
all but the most exclusive of Asheville boarding houses: "'Merciful God!'
howled Gant, 'you've had 'em all-blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards.
112 They all come here.'"
28
Doubtless W. 0. Wolfe, like Gant, enjoyed the celebrity among the
boarders which his commanding presence, dogmatic pronouncements, and
colorful and hyperbolic personality won for him:
Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would
hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the
quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his
torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his
prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.ll3
Less pleasant, indeed horrendous and humiliating, moments in the spot-light
must have been passed by W. 0. Wolfe when, in the throes of his
recurrent alcoholic seizures, he would cut a wide and abusive swath
through the boarders and seriously disrupt Mrs. Wolfe's endeavors to
114 carry on a remunerative business.
Ample evidence of other family members' disrelish of the boarding
house might easily be gleaned from Look Homeward, Angel. Virtually
every member of the family expresses himself on the subject at some point
in the novel, and I am not aware that any member of the family has had his
29
view substantially misrepresented . In a letter to Elizabeth Nowell concern-ing
Tom's infatuation with Clara Paul ("Laura James"), Mabel Wolfe Wheaton
wrote: " •.. she fitted into the boarding house business which I had
learned to hate."115 Later Mabel stated that:
• I was always more interested in 92 Woodfin than I was in 116 the Spruce Street house, even throughout the time Mama owned it.
Fred Wolfe recalled that, while the other Wolfe children were not so sensi-
117 tive on the issue as Tom, ''none of us liked to see Mama keep boarders.tt
In comparing the Old Kentucky Home with the previous residence, Fred
Wolfe remarked:
Why this is a house. That was a home. That was the scene of
our activity as children, the big Christmases, the big Fourth
of July celebrations. That's where all the food was. That's
where Mama reared us. That's where all the fruit and flowers
were. Why, that was home ..•• 118
Of all the Wolfe children, Tom seems to have been most traumatically
affected by the fractured family life and by the bleak, tumultuous ,
tawdry, and crowded life at the Old Kentucky Home:
Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland . •• he felt thwarted, netted,
trapped . He hated the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity
and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four
walls which shield us from them. He felt rather than understood,
the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives - his
spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as
there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives
could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and
perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they
had set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the
pattern.ll9
There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their
own inhabitation, no proof against the invasion of the boarders.l20
30
In contrast to the Old Kentucky Home, Thomas Wolfe would always remem -
121 ber the Woodfin Street house as expansive, warm, and hospitable. Wolfe ' s
principal biographers are agreed that the relative security and happiness
of his early youth were swept away with the purchase of the Old Kentucky
Home and the consequent disintegration of family life. 122 Like Eugene
Gant, the young Thomas Wolfe returned to his fatherts house whenever
possible:
the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and
added whimsey, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its
great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the
blistered varnish, the hot calf- skin, the comfort and abundance,
seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland • .
As a rule, it was during peak periods of the summer, when bed space was
at a premium, that Mrs. Wolfe would allow him to stay in his father's
house. The neurotic tenacity with which Mrs . Wolfe clung to her youngest
child was to permanently handicap him : "This abnormally prolonged infan­tile
relationship affected Wolfe's entire character and life."124 The
123
members of the family on Woodfin Street were very much aware of his feelings:
"[Tom] always wanted to live back home - we always left the doors un-
1 k d 11125 oc e . The separation of the family and the protracted and piti-able
deterioration of W. 0. Wolfe's health, which began less than a
decade afterward, all but destroyed the fabric of family life. For Thomas
Wolfe the results were to prove a life- long emotional instability and im-maturity,
a deep feeling of insecurity, a fear of enduring emotional
126 conmdtments, and a brooding introspectiveness. In the "Autobiographi-cal
Outline" now at Harvard which Wolfe used as a guide in the writing of
Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe noted: "After Woodfin Street
total lack of ritual in our life . •• 127
• the almost
Over the years the initial feelings of vague alienation of the Old
Kentucky Home took on a more definite shape. Like his father, Wolfe was
temperamentally and instinctively averse to certain pervasive features of
boarding house life. He detested the crass and demeaning commercialism
of "drumming up trade " with prospective boarders. He recoiled from the
enterpri se upon which his mother had embarked:
In him as in Gant , there was a silent horror of sel ling
for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one ' s
walls, to the guest, the stranger , the unknown friend from
out of the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the
broken , the knave, the harlot, and the fool.l28
Wolfe's lack of heart for drumming up trade for his mother ' s boarding
house was to be an enduring feature of his personality and character.
Mabel Wolfe Wheaton recalled that on several occasions Wolfe went to
considerable trouble to prevent his classmates at the University of North
Carolina from discovering that his mother kept a boar ding house. The
embarrassing event described in Look Homeward , Angel as having occurred
during the spring of his freshman year, seems to have had a f:trm basis in
129 fact. Mrs. Wolfe did in fact humiliate him during a visit to Chapel
31
•
Hill. The mortified and perplexed Wolfe reported the incident to his
sister at her home in Raleigh:
M-M-M- Mabel, Mable, my God, she's ruining me over at
Chapel Hill ••• I'll swear she's just r - r-ruining me with
my friends. • • • My God Mabel, do y-y-y-you know what Mama
d-d-did? Some of the fellows came to see her and when
they told her, just being p-p-p-polite, that they would
1-1-like to come to Asheville this summer, she said,
'Well, if you boys will d-d-drum me up some business
for the b- b-boarding house, I' 11 give you your b- b-board
for nothing.' I tell yoy3~-M-M-Mabel, Mama's just ruining
me over at Chapel Hill.
As a boy Wolfe found his privacy constantly intruded upon and his
spirit borne down by the petty annoyances of life in the Old Kentucky
Home. For many years he harbored a deep resentment of the numberless,
futile, demeaning, and random duties he was called upon to perform:
Eliza grumbled at the boy's laziness . She complained that
she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact,
he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of the
boarding house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy,
but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at
the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure
of daily labor.l31
This lingering resentment surfaced at other times in his work, as in the
"Three O'Clock" musings of young George Webber in The Web and the Rock:
And if there is work to do at three o'clock ••• for God's
sake give us something real to do •••• For God's sake don't
destroy the heart and hope and life and will , the brave and dream­ing
soul of man, with common, dull, soul-sickening, mean transac­tions
of these little things.l32
Another aspect of the boarding house operation in which Wolfe un-avoidably
found himself involved was his mother's perennial problems with
her hired help:
Eliza got along badly with the negroes •.•• she had never
been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or gov­ern
it graciously . She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls
constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. 133
32
Time and again Mrs. Wolfe would find herself deserted at a crucial point
in the boarding house routine and would be forced to implore Mabel's
assistance or send young Tom loathingly forth into the filth and degra-dation
of "Niggertown" in search of a wretch willing or desperate enough
to enter her dreaded employment. 134
Craving solitude, the young Thomas Wolfe would escape where he might
within the crowded vastness of the Old Kentucky Rome, at his father's
house on Woodfin Street, or in the playhouse. He employed what time and
privacy he could snatch from the bustle of family life to accomplish the
omnivorous reading which was to stand him in good stead for his life's
work. Family members joked of discovering him in secluded and unexpected
places "coiled up" and reading. Before moving on to the holdings of the
public library, Wolfe eagerly devoured his fatherts libarary on Woodfin
Street--a library remarkably rich and varied for a tradesman's library
of that day or this . The pleasure and escape which the young Wolfe found
in books was not sufficient, however, to counterbalance the hectic
drearinessand shallow turbulence of everyday family existence.
Years later, while engaged in the writing of Look Homeward, Angel,
Wolfe spoke bitterly of the trauma and sorrow of his childhood in a
letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts, the woman whose teaching and guidance
had rescued him from the ''bleak horror of Dixieland":135
You say that no one outside my family loves me more than
Margaret Roberts. Let me rather say the exact truth: - that
no one inside my family loves me as much, and only one other
person, I think, in all the world loves me as much. My book
if full of ugliness and terrible pain - and I think moments of
a great and soaring beauty. • I was without a home - a vaga-bond
since I was seven - with two roofs and no home . I moved
inward on that house of death and tumult from room to little
room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their
constant rocking on the porch. My overloaded heart was burst­ing
with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was
strangling, without speech, without articulation, in my own
33
secretions - groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes
and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward
beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed and
cheap ugliness - and then I found you, when else I should
have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light.
Do you think that I have forgotten? Do you think that
I ever will?l36
The year preceding the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe felt
it necessary to assure his mother that he had not irreconcilably turned
his back on his family:
I want to tell you something very plainly: I am not trying
to avoid seeing any of you . • • . There has been no evasion.
And, in spite of an ugly and rancorous feeling towards me which
may exist in the family - a dislike which most of us feel for
anything that is strange to us, remote from our experience, and
living on a separate level of thought and feeling - I want to
see you all very much - no matter howmuch pain and ugliness
I may have to remember.l37
It would be a mistake to represent Wolfe's childhood, after the pur-chase
of the Old Kentucky Home, as a protracted period of utter bleakness
and unhappiness. There were occasional good times still for the boy and
his family. At times the volatile children and parents blended harmoni.-
ously together. There were scattered peri.ods of espri.t and genuine en-joyment
of each other's company . Sometimes the mi.x of personalities in
the Old Kentucky Home would result in an agreeable rapport between the
Wolfes and their boarders. Wolfe forever retained fond memories of the
family and boarders gathered around the piano in the parlor, as Mabel
played and sang perennial favorites:
On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the
cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her
strong vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertoryof songs
classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft
cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders , and ~I Wonder Who's
Kissing Her Now, ,. which Gant demanded over and over; 'Love Me and
the World is Minet: ~Till the ~ands of the Desert Grow Cold';
'Dear Old Girl, the Rob-bin Sings Aoove You'; ~The End of a Perfect
Day, t and t Alexander ~s Rag-Time Band,,. wlrlch Luke had practised
in a tortured house for weeks~ and sung with thunderous success
in the high schoo1Minstrels.l~8
34
He listened with awed attentiveness as his father indulged his flair for
oratory and declamation or recited long passages of Gray, Tennyson, Scott,
Shakespeare, and others from memory. For several years after the purchase
of the Old Kentucky Home, he accompanied his mother on long extended trips
to Washington, Memphis, Hot Springs, Florida, and elsewhere.139 These
trips whetted an appetite for travel which, in his adult life, was seldom
sated, and afforded a welcome relief from the hectic unpleasantness of
boarding house life.
Notwithstanding the excess of sadness over joy in the future novel-ist's
life at the Old Kentucky Rome, the boarding house played a crucial
role in forcing his interaction with a colorful and unending parade of
personalities and characters of every possible description. Each of the
varying personages with which he came in contact might one day prove
useful to the writer; some were also meaningful and important to a sensi-ti
ve and insecure young man. According to Look Homeward , Angel, Wolfe
struck up a close friendship at the Old Kentucky Home during the summer
of 1914 with a spinster school teacher from New York. 140 The consolation
and understanding of a regular boarder from Florida, represented by Wolfe
as "Miss Irene Mallard," helped guide him through a difficult period of
his youth and afforded him a companionship which he sorely needed on at
least two occasions. 141 Doubtless there were many others over the years
with whom Wolfe formed lasting and heart-felt associations.
The Old Kentucky Rome brought him the poignant summer interlude with
Clara Paul from Washington, North Carolina, represented as "Laura James"
from "Little Richmond" in Look Homeward, Angel. Clara Paul was twenty-one
years old. She had come to Asheville with her ten year old brother because
of his ill health. Moreover, she was already promised to another, and,
35
after a brief stay at the Old Kentucky Home , she returned to Washington
and was married. Two years later she was to die of influenza. Wolfe con­siderably
fictionalized his account of the bitter-sweet romance in Look
Homeward, Angel; in truth it seems to have been an unconsumated infatua-
142
tion between a teenage boy and a young woman whom he knew to be engaged.
Less innocent, but not less instructive, were the brief encounters at
the Old Kentucky Home with women of easier virtue. Several episodes of
both active and passive seduction were recorded in Look Homeward , Angel~
such as the interludes with the incognito and mysterious prostitute '~ss
Brown" and the middle-aged dentist's wife from South Carolina, with whom
he carried on illicitly during the summer of 1920, until her consequent
143 ejection from the house by Mrs. Wolfe.
The passing parade of boarders through the years provided the future
novelist with an almost endless array of colorful and varied charcters,
faces, and memories from which to draw: The Ohio woman who died of typhoid
and whose distraught husband ''came quickly out into the hall and dropped
36
his hands"; the "thin-faced Jew" on the upstairs sleeping porch who "coughed
through the interminable dark"; the lunatic "mul-tye-millionaire, Mr. Simon";
"Miss Billie Edwards . • • , the daring and masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L.
Jones Combined Shows"; ''Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant
and usually absent drug salesman," who had an affair with Ben; ''Mr. Conway
Richards, candy wheel concQssionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined
Shows"; "Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse"; "Mr . William H.
Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,'' cotton grower, banker,
and sufferer from malaria; '~ss Annie Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta,
Georgia"; '~ss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina";
''Mrs . Rose Levin , twenty- eight, of Chicago, Illinois"; 11Miss Malone, the
gaunt drug- eater with the loose gray lips"; " Fowler, a civil engineer • • •
who came and departed quickly leaving a sodden stench of cornwhiskey in
his wake"; ' 'Mary Thomas, a tall, jolly, young prostitute who came from
Kentucky," who was a friend of "Helen's"; and the tall, mysterious ,
seductive, and adulterous Mrs. Selborne from South Carolina, who had a
b rief affair with "Steve" her fir st sununer in the Old Kentucky Home and
whose Negro cook ''W. 0. Gant" attempted unsuccessfully and disastrously
to seduce in the playhouse on Woodfin Street. 144
Wolfe would remember the winters in the Old Kentucky Home as periods
37
of frigid bleakness:
In the winter a few chil l boarders, those faces, those per­sonalities
which became mediocre through repetition , sat f or
hours before the coals of the parl or hearth , rocking inter min­ably,
dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with them­selves
and Dixieland, no doubt, as he [Eugene] with them. l45
The sununers, though crowded, hectic, and bereft of privacy, teemed
with impressions at once sensual and sensuous, which were stored up in the
capacious cache of Wolfe ' s memory:
There came slow- bodied women from the hot rich South, dark­haired
white bodied girls from New Orleans, com- haired blondes
from Georgia, nigger- drawling desire from South Carolina. And
there was malarial l assitude tinged faintly with yellow , from
Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced South
Carolinean, with n .icotined fingers, took him daily to baseball
games; a lank yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed
hills and wandered through the fragrant mountain valleys with
him, of nights he heard the rich laughter of the women, tender
and cruel, upon the d ark por ches , heard the florid throat tones
of the men; saw the yielding stealthy harlotry of the Sout h -
the dark secl usion of their midnight bodies, their morning
innocence . l46
In spite of its tumult, its sordidness, its lack of privacy, its petty
annoyance, and its emotional deprivation , boarding house life could not but
contribute vivid color and emotive intensity to the work of an autobio-graphical
novelist :
•
• • • the artist in him was bound to profit from the assortment
of types that came to the Old Kentucky Home, just as his being
born into a large, tempestuous family was a great human and
psychological advantage, much as he suffered from their out­bursts.
l47
The Old Kentucky Home, of course, figures most prominently in Look
Homeward, Angel as 11Dixieland. " It is the very hub around which the Gant
saga revolves:
The Old Kentucky home is so much like Dixieland that one who
enters the house for the first time feels as if he were re­reading
the book. Wolfe has described minutely and accurately
the rooms and furniture of the old boardinghouse.l48
The house plays an important part again in Of Time and the River, parti-cularly
as the scene of his father's continued decline and death. In
the two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home
Again, Wolfe, always sensitive to the accusation of being too autobio-graphical,
attempted to reduce and alter the almost literal transcription
38
of his memories into prose. Rather clumsily and transparently, he changed
the name of his protagonist from Eugene Gant to George Webber, and made
other changes in a misguided attempt to diverge from authobiography. These
attempts, however, were neither thorough-going, consistent, nor successful.
In spite of increasing endeavors to create r~ther than record, in spite of
changes in names and background, George Webber was almost as surely Thomas
Wolfe as Eugene Gant had been, and "Libya Hill" nearly as faithful a
rendering of Asheville as "Altamont" had been.
Ostensibly the old boarding house disappeared from his later work. In
The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again the house of George Webber's
youth is depicted as a small one-story house on Locust S~reet, built by his
Aunt Maw's father, Lafayette Yoy.ner. But, not unlike the Old Kentucky Home,
•
39
the house is described as being of frame construction with a porch, gables,
and bay windows . 149 In The Web and the Rock Wolfe overlapped Look Homeward,
Angel chronol ogically by creating a new youth for his protagonist. George
Webber is raised by his Aunt Maw, who has inherited responsibility for him
following the desertion of his father , John Webber, and the death of his
mother, Amelia- -Aunt Maw's younger sister. On first blush, Wolfe's charac-ters,
situations, and settings seem to have been transformed; but he was,
in fact, still mining the quarry of memories as Edward Aswell, the editor
of his posthumous novels noted:
Having abandoned Eugene Gant, he went back and re-created a new
childhood for George Webber, working in the things he had for­gotten
when he wrote Look Homeward, Angel as well as a few of
the things that had been cut from that book.l50
Floyd Watkins observed that, in The Web and the Rock, Wolfe added at least
sixty-four characters from both memory and imagination which he had not
used before". ' Wolfe inevitably returned to the fountainhead of memory and
experience which had served him so well in Look Homewarq Angel.
The Old Kentucky Home was of course the locale of various events which
formed milestones in the life of the Wolfe family. On September 16, 1908
Effie was married, in a very grand style, to Fred Gambrell of Anderson,
South Carolina, in the large dining room downstairs.152 rt was at the Old
Kentucky Home that Frank met and seduced his future wife, the asthmatic
Margaret Dietz, who had come to Asheville for her health from New Albany,
Indiana. 153 On the evening of June 28, 1916 Mabel Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton
were joined in conjugal union in a plush ceremony in the dining room, des-cribed
in the newspaper account as "the west parlor of the commodious
res1".d e nce. 11154
On the evening of October 19, 1918 occurred in the house the death of
Ben, of all Wolfe's siblings the one to whom he felt closest. It was not
only in Look Homeward, Angel that the death of his favorite brother proved
a shattering and pivotal event in his life. Nearly a decade later, in a
letter to his mother, Wolfe reflected the significance of his loss:
Life dropped one of its big shells on us and blew us apart.
Life at home practically ceased to be possible for me. when
Ben died.lSS
Ben had grown ill in the pitiably small and austere room upstairs with the
small sleeping porch. Subsequently he was moved for warmth and comfort
into the larger adjoining room on the northeast corner of the house:
• the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay­window.
It was next to the sleeping-porch where, but three weeks
before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. 156
The death scene which Thomas Wolfe would later describe--one of the great
scenes in all of literature--would be drawn from the sorrow and bitterness
157 of a very personal loss. Like W. 0., Julia, and Tom, who would follow
him at length, Ben "lay in the parlor bedded in his expensive coffin,"
158 against the wall on the right as one enters from the hall.
Four years later, on June 20, 1922, after many years of wretched and
hopeless combat with a rampant cancer, W. 0. Wolfe was to die in the down-
40
stairs back bedroom of the house which had so often been the object of his
eloquent invective. 159 The man who had once bestrode his small we~ld like a
reeling colossus, had in his declining years become an emaciated and self-pitying
old man. For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old
Kentucky Home, W. 0. Wolfe had resolutely continued to make his home on
Woodfin Street, despite the gnawing progress that cancer was maktng within
him during his last years there. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
indicated that his father's final move into the Old Kentucky Home. came
160 during the summer of 1917. This is corroborated by a letter of July 9,
161 1917 from W. 0. Wolfe to his son Ben. Mabel and Ralph Wheaton contin-ued
to live in the Woodfin Street house, and were accepting roomers there
in 1917 and 1918 . 162 As W. 0. Wolfe drew out his death on Spruce Street,
his home on Woodfin Street and his shop on Pack Square were sold in quick
succession. On April 24, 1920 the house was sold to one J . R. Durrett of
163 Marion County, Kentucky for $6,500 . Little more than a week later, on
41
164
May 3, 1920, the monument shop was sold to a Philip R. Moale for $25,000.
The two structures around which W. 0 . Wolfe's life had revolved for nearly
four decades were no longer so much as a part of it. 165 On May 22, 1920
Fred wrote a letter to Tom at Chapel Hi.ll, in which was reflected a mutual
resentment and melancholy toward what had happened:
I suppose that you are acquainted with the sale of the Woodfin
property and the Wolfe Building. As to what our personal opin­ions
are - regarding either - now is no time to cry over spilt
milk. I had nothing to do with either deal, nor was my advice
asked. I would suggest that nothing be said to worry Papa, he
was not the power behind the throne in the sales . My main hope
is - that he will be made comfortable for the remainder of his
days (long or short?) on Spruce St. l66
During the late winter of 1919-1920 the furniture in the Woodfin Street
167 house was moved into the Old Kentucky Home .
The house into which W. 0. Wolfe finally and reluctantly moved in 1917
was essentially as it is today. When Mrs. Wolfe bought the house in August
of 1906 it was probably very much as it had been since the massive additions
of 1885-1889. Thomas Wolfe best describes the overall appearance of the
house at the time of his mother's purchase:
It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant
sloping middleclass street of small houses and boarding houses.
Dixieland was a big , cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen
or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplan­ned,
gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a
pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row
of young deepbodied maples: there was a sloping depth of
one hundred and ninety feet , a frontage of one hundred and
twenty.l68
For ten years after Mrs. Wolfe•s purchase the house remained virtually
unchanged, but in 1916 she undertook a substantial enlargement in order
169 to accomodate a larger share of the tourist trade:
Meanwhile, business had been fairly good . Eliza's earning
power for the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by
her illnesses . Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off
the last installment on the house. It was entirely hers. The
property at this time was worth perhaps $12,000. In addition she
had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty year $5,000 life insurance policy
that had only two years more to run, and had made extensive alter­ations:
she had added a large sleeping porch upstairs, tacked on
two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and two baths, and
a watercloset, on the other . Downstairs she had widened the veranda,
put in a large sun- parlor under the sleeping porch, knocked out the
archway in the dining room, which she prepared to use as a big bed­room
in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the
family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her
own occupancy.
The construction was a.fter her own plans, and of the cheapest
material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and
flimsy rough plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at
a cost of only $3 , 000.170
The venerable hot - air furnace wlrlch had groaned and faltered under the
burden of heating the house before the additions, had no prayer of doing
so now . The rooms which had been added onto the back of the house upstairs
and the sleeping porch at the head of the stairs were heated by small wood
and coal stoves which opened into flues . In the early 1920s the old
furnace gave up the ghost entirely, and stoves and heaters were installed
in other rooms of the house. 171
Since 1916 the appearance of the house has changed little if at all,
except for an occasional change in color . Wolfe's description of the house
as painted a "dirty yellow'' was probably accurate for the entire period
depicted in Look Homeward, .Angel. .An undated hand-colored postcard shows
the house (being operated as the Colonial) as it appeared prior to 1916.
42
in April of 1921 W. 0. Wolfe wrote his son at Harvard of a recent change in
the appearance of the house: '~ou could not recognize the O.K.H. which is
newley [sic] painted cream body and chocklate [sic] trim."172 The house
has been white since at least the early 1950s and may have been so since
the late 1930s or early 1940s.
43
I have been unable to discover exactly how the house was furnished at
the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase. It seems probable that some of the Rev­erend
Myer's furnishings remained in the house when ownership changed. The
older of the two pianos and the formidable wood range in the kitchen are
known to have been in the house prior to 1906. 173 Because Mrs. Wolfe in­herited
nineteen boarders with the purchase of the house, it is likely that
much or all of the furniture in their rooms would have been left undisturbed .
Doubtless some furniture was brought up from Woodfin Street in 1906 and from
time to time thereafter. More would have come with W. 0. Wolfe during his
move in 1917. But until near the sale of the Woodfin Street house, there
was a need to leave adequate furnishings in the original house to maintain
a separate household. Finally, at the time of the sale of the Woodfin
Street house, the balance of its furnishings were moved into the Old
174 Kentucky Home.
For as long as Mrs. Wolfe operated the Old Kentucky Home as a board~g
house, the hub of activity was in the dining room. During the period of
Wolfe's youth depicted in Look Homeward, Angel there were four large tables
in the dining room, each with a capacity for eight to ten people. Near the
door stood the family table where boarders "of long standing" were some-times
invited to sit. After the additions in 1916 the family members
seemed to have been shunted off into the small pantry near the dining
room. Meals were served in four separate sets of dishes, so that each
44
of the tables was sufficient unto itsel£ . 175 During the salad days of the
boarding house operation, Mrs. Wolfe received a weekly remuneration from her
guests of seven or eight dollars. In addition to cooking for her regular
boarders, Mrs. Wolfe also served meals to outside guests or drop- ins, who
purchased their meals at prices ranging from 25¢ for breakfast to SO¢ for
176 Sunday dinner. In the early period much of the produce needed for the
Old Kentucky Home kitchen was supplied by the vegetable garden and fruit
trees at Woodfin Street. Mrs. Wolfe continued to raise smaller quantities
of vegetables and white grapes at the Old Kentucky Home until her last
days . 177 Mabel Wolfe Wheaton's recollection was that 'we had soup 365
days of the year" and that her mother charged eight to ten dollars a week
for room and board. 178 By the very early 1920s or before, when Mrs. Wolfe
gave up the boarding house business and began to keep roomers only, the
dining room was converted into a large bedroom. Look Homeward, Angel dates
179 the closing of the dining room as early as the death of Ben in 1918.
In the declining years of the Old Kentucky Home, the dining room fell into
desuetude and served only as storage space. 180
The Old Kentucky Home was operated under several proprietors during
the period of Wolfe ' s youth. Mrs . Wolfe very often took extended trips
during the slack winter months and occasionally at other times of the year.
During these periods of her absence the Old Kentucky Home was leased out to
others and was occasional ly operated under another name. According to
Mabel Wolfe Wheaton the house was being operated as the Colonial in 1910
by Mrs. 0 . L. Neville . 181 If this is true, the colored post card earlier
referred to can be dated accordingly. But the situation of 1910 is ren-dered
problematical by the City Directory of that year, which at once,
45
places Olive Neville and the Colonial at 29 Flint Street, states that the
Old Kentucky Home is being operated as a boarding house at 48 Spruce Street,
that the house at 48 Spruce Street is vacant, and that Mrs. Julia Wolfe is
idin 92 T.T dfin S i h the rest of the f.,.,...;ly ·. 182
res g at noo treet w t ~ In 1916 the
house was operated by M. M. and Catherine D. Castillo as the Richmond.
183
Probably there we re other proprietors and other names under which
the house was operated during Mrs. Wolfe's absence. Upon her return,
however, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have repossessed her boarding house with a
vengeance from her hapless tenants :
In the winter now, she rented Dixieland for a few months, some­times
for a year, although she really had no intention of allowing
the place to slip through her fingers during the profitable summer
season: usually she let the place go, more or less deliberately,
to some unscrupulous adventuress of lodging houses, good for a
month's or two months• rent, but incapable of the sustained effort
that would support it for a longer time. On her return from her
journey, with rents in arrears, or with some other violation of
the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would surge triumphantly
into battle, making a forced entrance with police, plain-clothes
men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all the artillery
of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly and with vindictive
pleasure, of her property.l84
Mrs . Wolfe followed a gruelling and hectic regimen in operating the
Old Kentucky Home, especially before closing the dining room. Wolfe would
later describe her compulsive toil as beginning before seven in the morning
and extending often until two o'clock the following morning. 185 In the
early years Mrs. Wolfe passed her fleeting hours of sleep in the front
bedroom downstairs with the bay window. Later, following the additions of
1916, she moved into the small bedroom at the rear of the house just off the
k •t h 186 ~ c en. Before 1920 and Wolfe's departure for Harvard, Mrs. Wolfe had
delegated much of the everyday operations of the house to a '~ss Newton,
a wrenny and neurotic old maid with asthma ••• [who] had gradually become
Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of the house,'' while she
devoted more and more of her time and energies to her proliferating real
estate speculations. 187
During the years of Wolfe's youth, North Spruce Street was a neighbor-hood
of private residences and several boarding houses. The Dixie, the
Colonial, the Elton, the Belvidere, and the ~elmont, their various pro-prietors,
and some of their boarders would have been among his recollec-tions
of the Spruce Street neighborhood (see Appendix G). An examination
of the city directories indicates that North Spruce Street was emerging as
a boarding house street as early as the 1890s. By the time of which Wolfe
wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, this development had made considerable head-way.
Across the street from the Old Kentucky Home and to the left, at 57
North Spruce, stood the Belmont (later the Belvidere), which Wolfe refers
to as "The Brunswick," According to Look Homeward, Angel, W. 0. Wolfe had
participated in the construction of this house, and later had refused his
wife's entreaties to collaborate 188 in its purchase. Wolfe also wrote of
"The Brunswick" that one of his few childhood friends on Spruce Street was
46
the son of its proprietor in 1910 (see Appendix G), and that its ravenous
guests were summoned to table by means of a Japanese gong. 189 Other boarding
houses in the near vicinity stood along Woodfin Street, North Main, and
College Streets, with names like Wyckoff Hall, the Lisbon, and the Ozark.
Wolfe grew up surrounded by these and other boarding houses and doubtless
was acquainted with many of the women who toiled within them. 190
During the years before Wolfe's departure for the University of North
Carolina, Spruce Street was experiencing a rapid turnover in residents. A
comparison of the City Directories for 1900, ·1906; 1910, and 1916 reveals
that a very low proportion of those dwelling on the street were permanently
settled. Of twenty individual residents listed in 1900, only six remained
47
in 1906. Of seventeen residents listed in 1906, only seven r emained in 1910.
And of twenty-one residents in 1910 , only six remained in 1916 , the year of
191 Wolfe's departure for Chapel Hill. These directories also reveal the
beginnings of an insidious encroachment by the commercial district onto the
street in the wake of Asheville's accelerated growth, and encroachment which
would at length comp l etely alter and disfigure the neighborhood.
The changes which were occurr ing in the surroundings of the Old Kentucky
Home during Wolfe ' s late pre-college years reflected changes which were
taking place in the city as a whole. Wolfe, himself, was deeply disturbed
by the heedlessly rapid growth and elemental transformations which were
taking place in Ashevil le during the first three decades of this century.
In the year of Wo l fe's birth Asheville had been a small town of 14,694
residents. By 1910 a slow growth had increased the population only to
18 , 762. But the city's growth had then begun to snowball; by 1 920 the
population had reached 28,504,and by 1930 had soared to 50,193. In the
wake of local and nationwide financial disasters, the momentum was then
l ost; during the decade of the 1930s the population increased only to
51,310. 192
The foundations of economic disaster in Asheville were alr eady well
laid before the Great Depression struck . Beginning about 1923 Wolfe began
to evince a marked repugnancy toward the shallow commer cial ism and grasping
materialism which was transforming Asheville almost beyond recognition. By
1926, Buncombe County , in the thrilling throes of a land boom, led the state
in the assessed value of its real est ate. The f ollowing year the crash
came. Asheville was financially devastated, and many of its leading cit i -
193 zens completely wiped out. Subsequent disasters befell the already
stricken city in 1929 and 1930 in the form of widespread bank failures and
•
the consequent bankrupt cy and ignom.inious col lapse of local government.
Four years after the publication of Look Homewa r d, Angel, in a letter to
his mother, Wolfe summed up his feelings toward what had happened in
Asheville:
I dislike the whole booster ~boom-town-country club whoop~it-up
kind of spirit because the whole thing is a lie and there is
not a single decent and honest human value in it and everybody
knows it .. • •
• • • • • • • • • • • • II; • • • • • •
I agree with you that it seems hard to see any immediate
hope for Asheville. They invested their whole lives in a toy
balloon and when the balloon burst, there was nothing left,
not even the wind they pumped into it.l94
To its most famous son, the fortunes of Asheville were never matters of
indifference. Throughout his career the city loomed prominently in his
195 thoughts and had continuing impact on his work. Fo l lowing two novels
almost entirely concerned with the larger world into which he had escaped
48
as a young man, it is significant that, with his last and uncompleted novel,
The Hills Beyond, Wolfe was returning, for subject matter, to the mountains
and people from which he had sprung.
By the time of Wolfe ' s departure for Harvard, the Old Kentucky Home
had seen its best days. Like the neighborhood of which it was a part, it
bad entered upon a protracted decline. After her initial trip to southern
Florida in January of 1923, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have devoted very little
time to the dwindling numbers of winter guests , Increasingly she was titil-lated
by the glo~ing potentials of real estate speculation in Miami and
Miami Beach, and thereafter repaired southward almost annually, drawn by
the combined inducements of warmer weather and the chance of fabulous wealth.
For many years she contemplated the construction of a modern apartment build­ing
in Miami, both as a sound investment and as a permanent resi.dence. 19b
Needless to say this recurring scheme never materialized, and the Old Ken-
•
tucky Home suffered a decline in business due to patterns of -Asheville's
development, local and national economic conditions, and the side effects
of two world wars.
During the erstwhile peak of the tourist season, in early July of
1917, W. 0. Wolfe wrote Ben that there were only eight boarders at the
Old Kentucky Home, due primarily to World War 1. 197 Two weeks later the
number of guests had risen to eighteen or twenty, but W. 0. Wolfe continued
to forecast a bleak tourist season. 198 In June of 1931 Fred wrote Tom
that there were only three or four in the house, and that their mother "so
far has had scarecly [sic] any one this year."199 Just before Christmas
of the same year, Mrs. Wolfe, in a letter to Tom, complained that well-to-do
winter travelers would no longer suffer the infamous chill of the Old
Kentucky Home, and that they were seeking more modern accomodations with
steam heat. Consequently she was being left with an increasingly indigent
and shiftless clientele, many of whom were out of work and able to pay
little or nothing for their rooms. 200 In March of 1932 Mrs. Wolfe reported
that there were no roomers in the house, that the place needed painting,
201 that the roof was leaking, and that some of the plumbing had burst. Her
letter of two months later must have roused unpleasant memories of "drum-ming
up trade" within her son's breast, as it exhorted him to promote
mountain trips among his New York friends and promised an ample supply
of Chamber of Commerce brochures to aid him in his endeavors. 202
By May of 1933 Mrs. Wolfe's business had grown so bad that she was
accepting for 50¢ a night undesirable roomers whom in better days she would
203 have turned away. During the mid 1930s the Old Kentucky Home was no
49
longer bringing in sufficient money to cover the cost of heat and utilities,
and Fred was having to contribute what he could to the upkeep of the house. 204
•
Mrs. Wolfe recognized that during the financial boom of the early and mid
1920s Asheville bad begun to change in such a way as to place Spruce Street
outside the normal lines of travel, and that the relentless transition of
Spruce Street fromaresidential to a commercial area had rendered the
surroundings less and less inviting to potential guests.
By the winter of 1938 Mrs. Wolfe had begun to sleep on a bed in the
parlor in an effort to keep warm in the delapidated and ill-maintained
structure:
I feel the cold but I dress like an Eskimo, to keep from suf­fering,
but can ' t get any work done for I have to stay close
to the fire here in the living room, even sleep here. This
house was built for summer boarding house, now old, obsolete-­could
not be made comfortable besides [it] would cost more than
to build a modern house.205
During the year just prior to his death, Wolfe described the Old Kentucky
Home and his mother's attachment to it in a letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts,
who had inquired whether two young visitors to Asheville might not stay
there :
As for Mama~s house, there is certainly room there, but it
is frankly in a delapidated state--an old house in a state
of disrepair, which has long since passed its palmy days.
Of course it is Mama ' s house and she loves it and sees it
with a different eye, but these are the facts and I don't
know whether it would be advisable for the young people to
stay there or not.206
A constant and o:(ttimes solitary roomer at the Old Kentucky Home from
1922 to 1933 was the shadowy Theodore ("Ted") Salmer, a mild , softspoken,
shabby, pitiable, and alcoholic man, who for eleven years helped look
after things in the house, provided companionship for Mrs. Wolfe, and
finally died at her feet of a massive hemorrhage one Sunday morning in
207 November of 1933. Family letters from the 1920s and earl y 1930s
sometimes mention that "Old Salmer" has been left in charge of the house
50
51
during Mrs. Wolfe ' s absence or that he is currently the only roomer in
the house. Fred Wolfe recal ls him fondly, and remembers that Mrs. Wolfe
allowed Salmer to stay in the house for little or no payment. 208 Salmer
appears fleetingly as "Gilmer" in Wolfe's story "The Return of the Prodi-
1 11ga . 209 Indeed, Wolfe's notebook for early 1934 reveals that he was
contemplating, but never completed, an entire short story built around a
210
roomer at the Old Kentucky Home whom he planned to call "Gilmer."
Upon hearing of Salmer's death, Wolfe wrote his mother in commiseration:
A postcard from Mabel this morning informed me that Mr.
Salmer died Sunday and that you were with him when he died .
I know what a sad thing this must be for you and that you have
lost a good friend . All of us I know feel sad about it because
we all liked him. 211
Between 1917 and 1925 North Market Street was cut through behind the
Old Kentucky Home, between North Main and North Spruce Streets, as the in-cursions
of the downtown commercial district into the neighborhood con-tinued
apace. As early as 1922 city planners envisioned drastic changes
in the formerly residential section of which the Old Kentucky Home was a
part. A comprehensive proposal of that year for Asheville ' s future devel-opment
called for the establishment of a civic center to the north of Col-lege
Street, between Spruce and Oak Streets, which was to contain a post
office, a library, a federal building, and a community center. The proposed
plan of development pointed out that the Spruce Street area was in close
proximity to Pack Square, that it was outside the normal flows of traffic,
that it was not yet highly developed, that it should be inexpensive to pro-
cure, and that it was a suitable location for a large downtown hotel. 212
By 1930 the once residential North Spruce Street boasted a tire company,
two automotive electrical shops, one new car dealer, two used car lots, two
garages, and two funeral homes . To the rear and north of the Old Kentucky
•
Home, at the corner of North Market and Woodfin Streets, the Asheville­Biltmore
Hotel had risen. 213 Of special significance in the subsequent
history of the Old Kentucky Home was to be the erection of Harry's Motor
Inn directly to its rear. On December 21, 1926 Harry D. Blomberg signed
an agreement with Mrs. Wolfe to lease the Old Kentucky Home property be-tween
the back of the house and North Market Street and to build upon it
214 a large one-story garage, subject to her approval of the plans . Blom-berg
would later play a crucial role with regard to the house, and the
unsightly garage which he constructed still stands pressed snugly against
its backside. The trend of the neighborhood downward, once begun, was
never reversed.
Scattered brief descriptions of the house after the neighborhood's
decline can be gleaned from several sources. In 1935 G. E. Dean,
writing for The State, rendered the following description:
It is the same rambling, unplanned, added-to, gabular affair
with 18 or 20 rooms and painted on the outside a dirty yellow
as described in the novel Look Homeward, Angel . But about it
now there is something of a semblance of a dusty museum which
never fails to fascinate readers who delight in seeing the
book come to life.215
Dean noted the presence of numerous photographs in the parlor and the piano
on the sun porch, over which were hung two of Thomas Wolfe's diplomas. 216
Another description dating from 1935 described the neighborhood as "shabby
and non-descript." The house was said to have a "Tourists" sign on the
front lawn, a faded "Old Kentucky Rome" sign over the front door, and to
have "recently been painted a somewhat startling shade of yellow. " The
parlor was reported to have a red carpet and lace curtains . A marble-top
table held copies of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and
the walls were "decorated with innumerable photographs, and Tom's college
52
53
217 diplomas. " In August of 1940 a visitor noted that Mrs . Wolfe was taking
roomers at $1.00 a day. The front yard was said to be grassless, flowerless~
and broom- swept . The house badly wanted paint and its overall appearance
was one of "a cheap boarding house ." In the parlor were easy chairs and a
davenport. An upright piano stood diagonally across one corner of the
room and atop the piano was a photograph of Tom . Two enlarged tintypes of
the twins, Grover and Ben , adorned one wall of the parlor. On the sunporch
broken window panes had been replaced with newspapers . The central light
fixture of the sun parlor was socketed for six bulbs but contained only two.
The second of the two upright pianos stood diagonally across one corner of
the sun parlor. In addition, the sun parlor contained a mission oak daven-port,
a windowseat with cushions, and a table with potted plants. The over-all
impression of the house was one of loneliness and bleakness , yet this
writer was told by a Florida couple currently staying there that Mrs. Wolfe
218 "runs the cleanest boarding house in Asheville."
Through the years Mrs. Wolfe clung to the old boarding house, which was
drawing increasing numbers of visitors, if not roomers, as her son ' s novels
gained increasing audiences. Ironically, the growth of public interest in
Mrs. Wolfe and the Old Kentucky Home developed against a background of finan-ci
al and legal reverses of a most serious aspect--reverses which would
finally result in bankruptcy and loss of the house at public auction. The
financial and legal odyssey which resulted at length in Mrs. Wolfe ' s loss of
the Old Kentucky Home would be tedious to relate in every detail. Its even-tual
loss was preceded and surrounded by labyrinthine legal and fina ncial
entanglements which are extremely difficult to fully unravel and which as
yet have received little or no attention, It is hoped that the following
account of this tmportant episode in the history of the house ~1 steer a
middle course between excessive brevity and unendurable tedium. 219
On October 17, 1922, some four months after the death of W. 0.
Wolfe, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton were duly qualified as executors
of his will and were entered upon the administration of his estate.
They were empowered by provisions of the will to disperse $5,000 each
to Effie , Frank, Mabel, Fred, and Tom, after which the balance of the
estate was to devolve upon Mrs. Wolfe. Soon after the issuance of their
letters testamentary, however, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton became in­active
as executors, having only partially satisfied the provisions of
the will. After remaining inactive until 1937, their letters were re-voked
and the further administration of the W. 0. Wolfe estate was placed
in the hands of S. J. Pegram by order of the clerk of Buncombe Superior
Court. Soon after the death of W. 0. Wolfe, however, in the absence of
54
an on- going administration of the estate by its executors, Mrs. Wolfe had,
in practice, taken control over her husband's estate , buying, sell ing, and
investing freely, upon the mistaken assumption of her legal right to do so
under the provisions of the will. There had followed numerous financial and
property transactions on the part of Mrs . Wolfe, principally in Asheville
and Miami, as she speculated wildly on the crest of real estate booms in
both areas. By the summer of 1927 Mrs. Wolfe had overextended herself
and felt that her financial affairs had grown too sizable and complex for
her continued personal management. Moreover, the real estate bubbles in
both Asheville and Miami had burst, and she had encumbered many of her
holdings to such an extent that they were in imminent danger of fore­closure
for debt.
On June 10, 1927 Mrs. Wolfe entered into an irrevocable ''Living Trust"
agreement with Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, whereby she vir tually sur-
55
220 rendered all personal control of her financial affairs. Thenceforward
she exercised the power neither to loose nor bind those monies and proper-ties
attached to the corpus of the trust estate by the original and supple-mental
agreements . On June 14, 1927 the Old Kentucky Home was joined to
the corpus of the agreement, thereby relinquishing control of the house
which, even then, her son was in the process of immortalizing as he wrote
221 Look Homeward, Angel. There followed a complex and confusing series of
deeds in trust, promissory notes, and loans which further complicated the
legal ties which bound the Old Kentucky Home to Mrs. Wolfe's agreements
with Wachovia. By January of 1937 the old boarding house (referred to in
the various financial and legal documents as the "First lot") was heavily
encumbered by four substantialmortgages and a lien against the house for
222 unpaid taxes.
At length Mrs . Wolfe ' s failure to maintain the payment of her crushing
indebtedness and her non-payment of city and county taxes over a number
of years, for which Wachovia assumed responsibility as trustee, resulted in
the issuance of a summons by Wachovia on January 4, 1937 against Mrs. Wolfe,
the Wolfe children and their spouses, various city and county officials,
private individuals with separate liens against Wolfe properties, Wachovia
223 Bank and Trust Company, Trustee, and, subsequently, against S. J. Pegram
as administrator of the W. 0. Wolfe estate.
From June 10, 1927 to March 1, 1937 the trust estate had realized f rom
rents, notes, real estate sales, and miscellaneous sources $115,707 . 42 in
income . Over the same period, however, the total disbursements necessary
for the maintenance of the estate had totaled $138,169.11, so that the
estate was deeply in debt to Wachovia as trustee. In addition, the estate
was encumbered by unpaid liab:tli.ti.es of $126,663 . 66 composed of debts in-
curred, interest due, and unpaid commissions. At the time the suit
was initiated, Wachovia estimated the rental value of the Old Kentucky
Rome, "a very old residence," to be no more than $50.00 a month. In
early 1938 the court appointed referee was to gauge the value of the
house and lot at $26,100. The Old Kentucky Home and seven other of
Mrs. Wolfe's properties, six of which were unimproved, were the sole
assets remaining to the estate, and Wachovia had brought the action after
concluding that the estate's excess of liabilities over assets could only
be expected to worsen.
The Wolfes argued, in their answer to Wachovia's complaint and in
several subsequent countersuits, that Wachovia had grossly underestimated
the value of the estate's remaining assets and its original value, that
Wachovia and Mrs. Wolfe had violated the provisions of W. 0. Wolfe's will,
and had attacked the interests of his heirs by entering into the trust
agreement in the first place, that Mrs. Wolfe had been unduly hastened
and cajoled into making the agreement without being sufficiently informed
of its consequences, and that the estate had been managed negligently and
unskillfully, while wise advice and lucrative opportunities had gone
begging. As a culmination of their contercharges, the Wolfes alleged
that they were entitled to $150,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000
in punitive damages from Wachovia for its "gross and willful negligence''
and mismanagement.
Following a series of legal maneuvers on both sides, the cause was
referred to George A. Shuford, Referee, by order of Buncombe Superior
Court Judge A. Hall Johnston on December 16, 1937 . Shuford began to hear
evidence of January 31, 1938 and finally submitted his report on December
56
57
21 of that year. In his report Shuford concluded that the trust agreement
had become "impossible of fulfillment" and that the estate was " totally
insolvent. " He further found that the estate of W. 0. Wolfe had no viable
interest in the litigat ion, that the Wolfe children and their spouses were
not legitimate parties therein, and that Wachovia was entitled to sell the
remaining assets of the estate for recovery of Mrs . Wolfe's defaulted debts.
Shuford's original findings of fact and conclusions of law were appeal­led
by the Wolfes, and the cause was referred to him a second t±me on Janu­ary
19 , 1939 by Buncombe Superior Court Judge J. Will Pless, Jr . Referee
Shuford ' s final report of January 28, 1939 was amended only slightly , in
part to adjust its findings and concl usions to the Wolfe ' s counterclaims.
As in his original report, Shuford found against the Wolfes on virtually
every item of Wachovia ' s complaint. Furthermore, he exonerated the corpo­ration
from any all egat ions of negligence or wrongdoing and declared the
Wolfe's counterclaim to have no merit in law. The Wolfes ' counterclaim
was subsequently dismissed by Judge Pless on June 16, 1939. On August 17,
1939 Judge J. A. Rousseau of Buncombe Superior Court , following a jury
verdict against the Wolfes, handed down a decision in favor of Wachovia
which in effect accepted and confirmed Referee Shuford's reports.
In his Judgement and Decree Judge Rousseau ordered Mrs. Wolfe to pay
Wachovia the enormous sums due them by August 31. Failing that, Reed
Kitchen was appointed commissioner with the authority to sell separately
her encumbe r ed properties at the door of courthouse on behalf of the
plaintiff creditor, Wachovia, which was to be permitted to participate
in the bidding . In the event , Mrs. Wolfe proved unable to repay her
onerous debts . There were no means at hand to save the Old Kentucky
Home from the auctioneer~s gavel, and, on Monday, October 2, 1939, at
•
high noon, the old boarding house was sold to Wachovia Bank and Trust
224 Company for a total price of $32,876.65.
The grueling and protracted legal battle and Mrs. Wolfe's eventual
loss of the house involved the children in varying degrees. Almost cer-tainly
there was some festering resentment against their mother for having
squandered a portion of the inheritance due them from their father's
estate. On the whole, however, the children were bound together in sym-pathy
for their mother and in resentment of Wachovia and the "Living
Trust." A number of letters between family members from the late 1930s
convey this impression . As on most occasions, Fred was most unequivocal
in his analysis of the situation, as evinced in his explanation of the
"Living Trust" agreement to Tom:
It is a very insidious and insecure and one-sided Hellish
instrument which gave them full power to act and destroy
and dissipate the entire estate. • All hers and our
interests due to their mishandling and squandering of the
estate have been destroyed. Their suit also pleads for
recovery of Old Kentucky Home property street to street
including Harry' s Motor Inn . Mama is holding due to occu­pancy
of the premises, and can be evicted by court action
based on the outcome of the suit.
I started the thing since they were suing us and mama and will
see it through, come what may, as we either fight back or else
let them kick mamma out. 225
As early as February 15, 1937 Wolfe was expressing concern over the
bank suit in a letter to his mother:
Fred spoke to me in his letter of trouble which Wachovia
Bank is now making for you concerning the house on Spruce
Street. • • • Fred didn't tell me much about the Wachovia
trouble, but I wish when you get time, some of you would
write and tell me about it.226
By April 28, 1937, largely as a result of the law suit, he was beginning
to weigh whether he should end his self-banishment from Asheville:
I want to come down to see you and talk to you and find
out what this Wachovia Bank business is all about . If there
is anyway I can help, I want to do so.
58
It will be a very strange experience , I think,
coming back to Asheville after all these years.227
59
In any event, Wolfe's concern and curiosity over the bank suit and
the possible loss of the Old Kentucky Home proved important factors in
his decision to return to Asheville in May of 1937~ after nearly eight
228 years of voluntary exile. On May 3, 1937 Wolfe stole silently into
town and made his way to 48 Spruce Street. At the time of his arrival,
his mother's legally imperiled boarding house boasted but a single
229 roomer, a school teacher .
The prodigal novelist's return to Asheville was both successful and
reassuring. So pleased and relieved was Wolfe by his hometown's reception
in May that he resolved to spend the summer there following a brief return
to New York. Raving arranged to rent a secluded cabin at Oteen from
c artoonist, Max Whitson, Wolfe returned to Asheville from New York in
1 J 1
230 ear y u y. The summer proved a disastrous mistake . Wolfe had hoped
to see his family and a few old friends, to get some writing done, to
enjoy the peaceful privacy of the cabin, and to commune once again with
the mountain surroundings he had loved since childhood. Instead the
summer became a series of unending disturbances, uninvited visitors,
phone calls, questions, autographs, notoriety, and family discord. At
the Old Kentucky Home Tom and Frank clashed almost as soon as they met .
Wolfe found the atmosphere of his mother's home so strained that he spent
more time at Mabel's residence than on Spruce Street, thus exacerbating
the anci~nt jealousy between sister and mother. The reunion of the volatile
family members once again under the same roof produced a chain of small ex-
231 plosions which Wolfe found unpleasant and vexing in the utmost degree.
Weary of the constant disturbances at the Oteen cabin , Wolfe moved secretly
into the Battery Park Hotel in late August, in hopes of securing rest
and so1 1. .tud e. 232 A few days prior to his final departure from Asheville,
Wolfe moved into his mother's house on Spruce Street. 233 The last night
Wolfe ever spent in the Old Kentucky Home must have been the night of
September 4, 1937. He left for New York, never to see Asheville again,
on the following day. 234
The summer in Asheville had been anything but pleasant. While Wolfe
had been relieved to find the old animosities over Look Homeward, Angel
subsided, the visit had proven extremely taxing physically, psychologi-cally,
and emotionally. Old family wounds had been reopened, especially
between himself and Frank, and Wolfe had resolved not to return to Ashe-ville
. The bitter feelings he harbored on the subject of his homecoming
were reflected in a letter to Fred:
About the summer I spent at home, my first return in seven
years or more, the less said the better. I'd like to forget about
it if I could. I went home a very tired man, not only with all
this trouble of Scribner's gnawing, but the pressure and accumu­lation
of everything that has happened in the past two years .
And when I left home I was as near to a breakdown as I have
ever been. • • .
It's too bad things had to turn out the way they did this
summer: I had hoped that things would have changed: I had been
away so long that I thought maybe they would be different. But
I found out they were just the same, only worse: So I guess that's
the end of me in Asheville. I'm sorry that you felt that I did not
go around to the house enough this summer. I went all I could, but
the situation there was such that I could not have gone more often
than I did. • • • I have something in me that some people value,
that has given some people happiness and pleasure, and that people
think is worth saving. I think so too, and that is why I'm going
to try to save it .
I'm willing to do anything I can to help any one of my own
kin in any way I can, but I'm not willing to waste my life and
talent in an atmosphere of ruin and defeat, among people who can't
be helped and who have been so defeated that they hate everything
in life that has not been, and want to drag it down. I'm sorry to
have to talk this way, but I have been driven to it. I've felt
pretty sick and sore at heart when [sic, since] I left home, as it 235 has been so sad and so different from what I had hoped it would be.
60
61
Tragically, Wolfe would not long be able to save that "something" in
him which had "given some people happiness and pleasure. " In little more
than a year after his departure from Asheville, his life would be prematurely
extinguished by miliary tuberculosis of the brain, in the thirty-seventh year
of his age. Wolfe grew gravely ill in the mid summer of 1938, following
his "Western Journey"--an extensive and grueling two-week sweep through
the national parks of the western United States by automobile from June 21
to July 1. As he lay sick in Seattle, Washington, he was joined first by
Fred and then by Mabel,

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'l."l--G1AS IDLFE AND THE
OW KENTUCKY HGm
Vol. I.
}o)y~
Wilson Angley
STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
Department of Cultural Resources
Raleigh 27611
December I ~ 1975
James E. Holshouser, Jr.
Governor
.Grace J. Rohrer
Secretary
LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Division of Archives and History
Larry E. Tise, Director
The attached report on the Thomas Wolfe Memor ial State Historic Site w.as
written by Mr . Wilson Angley, a candidate for the Ph . D. degree in b.ts.tory at
The University of North Carol ina. Mr . Angley worked In excess of 720 bours
on this report in the summer and fa I I of 1975. Th ~s Is to cert tfy that b.e
has complied with alI of the terms of the agreement under wnlcn the report
was compiled . It is as complete as funds and time permitted.
A word of caution is extended to the reader concerning the transcribed
documents inc luded in Appendix M. These t ranscriptions were ta ken from copies
of poor quality microfi lm. They should be compared with the orlgtnal documents.
in the Buncombe County Courthouse for accuracy.
While I think Mr . Ang ley d i d a most
doubt, additions and corrections to this
of such observations so that they may be
the report.
commendable job , there wl l I be , no
document . Please send to me coptes
includ:;;e272-J ~orical Research Supervisor
HISTORICAL RESEARCH REPORT
THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME
by
Wilson Angley
October 30, 197 5
Raleigh, North Carolina
-
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME
A. Text
B. Footnotes
C. Bibliography
II. APPENDIXES
A. List of Contents of the Old Kentucky Home prepared October 1 , 1919
B. Inventory To Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association, From the Heirs of
Thomas Wolfe and Julia E. Wolfe , As of Date , May 3, 1949
C. Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Inventory - August 13, 1974
D. List of Thomas Wo l fe's personal property on Storage at MAMMOTH
STORAGE WAREHOUSE, INC. - 410 - EAST 54th Str eet - NEW YORK CITY
E . Miscellaneous Volumes from Library of W. 0 . WOLFE
F . Books in the Wolfe Home Belonging to Various Members of the Wolfe
Family
G. Partial List of Other Boarding Houses on North Spruce Street
from 1906 to 1916
H. Selected Bibliography of Wolfe's Published Writings
I . THOMAS WOLFE HOUSE CITATIONS FROM LOOK HOMEWARD , ANGEL
J. Miscellaneous Notes on Specit~c Items
K. GeneralAssembly of North Carolina, 1973 Session , Senate Bill 1046:
"An Act Appropriating Funds for the Establishment of the Thomas
Wolfe Memorial as a State Historic Site."
L . Exhibits
M. Deeds
1. J. M. Israel toW. 0. Wolfe (1881), Buncombe County Deeds,
2.
3.
4.
5.
6 .
7.
8 .
9.
10.
11.
Book 41, pp. 371-372
E. Sluder toT. Van Gilder (1881), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 41, pp. 392-393
T. Van Gilder to E. Sluder (1882), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 41, pp . 406 - 407
E. Sluder to C. Barnard (1884), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 46, pp. 183-185
W. W. Barnard to J. H. Herring (1884), Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 46, pp. 361- 363
J. H. Herring to C. Barnard (1885), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 48, pp . 98 - 99
W. 0. Wolfe to J. Wolfe (1886), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 74, pp. 216 - 217
W. W. Barnard to A. J. Reynolds (1887), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 68 , pp . 206-208
C. V. Reynolds toT . M. Myers (1900), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 112, p. 543
T. M. Myers to J. Wolfe (1906), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 147, pp. 402-404
W. 0. Wolfe to J. R. Durrett (1920), Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 237, p. 245.
•
TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued)
12. W. 0 . Wolfe toP. R. Moale (1920), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 242, p. 244
13. J . Wolfe to H. Blomberg (1926), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 374, pp. 543-548
14. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Living Trust Agreement
15. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 377, p. 70
16. R. Kitchen to Wachovia Bank (1939), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 519, pp. 35- 36 .
17 . Wachovia Bank to H. Blomberg (1941), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 541, pp . 35 - 36
18 . H. Blomberg to J . Wolfe, et al. (1942), Buncombe County Deeds,
Book 54 1 , pp. 521- 522
19. F. Wo l fe, e t a l. to J . Wolfe (1944) , Buncombe County Deeds ,
Book 565, pp. 51 0 - 513
20 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949),
Buncombe County Deeds, Book 671, pp. 285 - 288
21 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949),
Bailment Agreement
22 . Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association to City of Asheville (1958),
Buncombe County Deeds, Book 798, p. 562
23. City of Asheville to State of North Carolina (1 975), Buncombe
County Deeds, Book 1114, pp. 421-424
In the old house of time and silence there is something that
creaks forever in the night, something that moves and creaks for­ever,
and that never can be still.l
And all of it is as it has always been: again, again, I turn, and
find again the things that I have always known: the cool sweet
magic of the starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of
dark, the slope, the street, the trees, the living silence of the
houses waiting, and the fact that April has come back again • • •
and again, again, in the old house I feel beneath my tread the
creak of the old stair, the worn rail , the white-washed walls, the
feel of darkness and the house asleep , and think, 'I was a child
here; here the stairs, and here the darkness; this was I, and
here is Time . ' 2
Thomas Wolfe's "house of time and silence" now commemorates the
author whose life and art it so forcibly and endurably shaped . Eventu-ally
Wolfe was to take upon himself the Herculean labor of translating
this country ' s entire experience into prose , of capturing the very es-sence
of America. Inevitably he failed to ach~evethis goal , but not be-fore
having established for himself a permanent place among the foremost
ranks of American writers, many of whose goals had also proven impossible
of attainment :
••• among his and my contemporaries, I rated Wolfe first be­cause
we had all failed, but Wolfe made the best failure because
he tried t he hardest to say the most •••• Man has but one short
life to write in, and there is so much to be said, and of course
he wants to say it all before he dies. My admiration for Wolfe
is that he tried his best to get it all said; he was willing to
throw away style, coherence, all the rules of preciseness, to
try to put all the experience of the human heart on the head of
a pin as it were . 3
But Wolfe never succeeded so well as when writing of his youth and
of growing up in Asheville. When, in his writing, he departed from the
Asheville setting and the recollections of his boyhood there, something of
vividness, cohesion , and structure was surrendered. He never quite equa led
Look Homeward, Angel, in which he poured forth the memories of his youth in
a rich lyrical p r ose, replete with vivid sensory images . In his later work
1
he returned again and again to the scenes of his youth, and when he did so
his work was the better for it:
Wolfe was a man of tremendous powers of memory; it was his chief
artistic resource. It made possible Look Homeward, Angel. But
it was also his chief limitation. When his memory failed to pro­vide
him with both the raw material and the perspective for the
work of art, the result was empty, lifeless prose.4
Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe 's editor at Scribner's and the man to whom Wolfe was
most deeply indebted as a writer, realized the crucial molding influence
of his early years:
I think no one could understand Thomas Wolfe who had not seen
or properly imagined the place in which he was born and grew up.
Asheville, N.C. is encircled by mountains . The trains wind in
and out through labyrinths of passes. A boy of Wolfe's imagina­tion
imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all
wonderful - different from what it was where there was not for
him enough of anything. . • •
• . . Wolfe was in those mountains - he tells of the train whistles
at night - the trains were winding their way out into the great
world where it seemed to the boy there was everything desirable,
and vast, and wonderful.
It was partly that which made him want to see everything, and
read everything, and say everything . S
Wolfe's youth was centered around two very different houses in Ashe-
2
ville: the one at 92 Woodfin Street where all the Wolfe children were born,
the other at 48 Spruce Street which his mother operated as a boarding house
and which Wolfe would later inunortalize as "Dixieland." Both houses were
important in shaping Wolfe's personality, character, and work. Of the first
something should be said because it exists no longer, of the second much
must be said for it now stands as a memorial to his achievements.
The Old Kentucky Home, now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, is situated on
a plot of land linked to the very beginnings of the City of Asheville. On
July 7, 1794 the prominent miller, John Burton, received a grant of land from
the State of North Carolina for some two hundred acres in Buncombe County
known as the "Town Tract." The boundaries of this original grant relate
in the following way to the present-day city: the northern boundary ex-tended
along a line from Charlotte Street, near its intersection with
Clayton Street, westward [Sondley inadvertently says eastward] along
Orange Street to a point east of Broadway [formerly North Main], thence
southward to approximately Coxe Avenue, thence eastward to the eastern
extremity of Atkin Street, and finally northward to Charlotte Street and
6 the beginning again. Thus the future Spruce Street and site of the Old
Kentucky Home were embraced within the boundaries of the original grant
to the "founder of Asheville," upon which the nucleus of the city was
constructed.
By 1840 Asheville had grown but little. The entire eastern portion of
3
the city, bounded on the west by North and South Main Streets [now Broadway
and Biltmore Avenue], on the north by Woodfin Street and on the south by
the southern boundary, boasted a mere eight residences, excluding slave
quarters . Nearly the whole of this area of about three hundred acres was
owned by James McConnell Smith, James W. Patton, Montraville Patton, Dr.
7 J. F. E. Hardy, Mrs. Rose Morrison, and Thomas L. Gaston. The immediate
vicinity of the Old Kentucky Home seems to have belonged to James McConnell
Smith and to have contained no private dwellings at all:
Beginning at the corner of Woodfin Street, Mr. J. M. Smith ran
up to the public square and back to Spruce Street and with it
to Woodfin Street, owning all in this block, upon which there
was no building save the old Buck Hotel and its belongings and
one small two room frame dwellin§ about where Mr. Jenkins' store
on North Main now [1905] stands .
James McConnell Smith was born at the future site of Asheville on
June 14, 1787, the son of Colonel Daniel S~th and Mary Davidson Smith.
I
He is believed to have been the first white child born in North Carolina
west of the Blue Ridge. In 1814 he married Mary ("Polly") Patton, daughter
of Colonel John Patton of Swannanoa. Smith throve in a nunber of business
ventures in Asheville in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth
century and was the holder of extensive lands in Asheville, Buncombe
County, and Georgia. He built and kept the old Buck Hotel, maintained a
store and tanyard, ran several farms in the Asheville area, managed a
ferry on the French Broad River, and later constructed and operated the
county's first bridge over that stream. Until his demise on May 18, 1856
at the age of sixty-eight, Smith enjoyed the status of one of Asheville's
wealthiest and most prominent citizens . 9
By 1881 the land upon which the Old Kentucky Home now stands was
owned by one Erwin Sluder, a banker. By an indenture dated October 4 of
that year Sluder and his wife, the former Julia A. Shepherd, conveyed a
4
large lot on Spruce Street to a prominent Asheville hardware merchant, Thomas
Van Gilder, for $800. 10 Almost exactly a year later, on October 3, 1882,
Sluder repurchased one half of this property from Van Gilder, leaving each
in possession of identical lots on Spruce Street measuring ninety- five by
11 one hundred and ninety feet. It is on the lot repurchased by Sluder that
the Old Kentucky Home now stands. Between Sluder's repurchase of October 3,
1882 and his subsequent sale of the property on January 13, 1884 , the pur-
12 chase price increased from $400 to $3 , 500. Almost certainly then the
original house was erected in 1883.
At the time the bouse was constructed, Asheville was a remote settle-ment
of 3,874 people, 2,408 o f whom were white, 1,466 Negro . Five general
merchandise stores c lustered about Courthouse or Public Square [now Pack
Square]. The Bank of Asheville was the city's only such institution . The
professions were represented by twenty-six attorneys, seven dentists, and
eleven physicians. There were some thirty-eight streets, usually passable.
Already Asheville accomodated its small but budding toutl$ttrade in six
modest hotels . The city's moral and religious instruction was carried on
in nine houses of worship (six white, three Negro) and in seven schools of
various description. Asheville ' s Board of Trade, the future Chamber of
13 Commerce, had been in existence scarcely a year.
By the early 1880s the stage was already being set for Asheville ' s
5
development as a major tourist and health resort. During much of the nine-teenth
century Asheville had remained a remote and almost inaccessible
mountain settlement . As early as 1795 a crude wagon road had been completed
from the south through Saluda Gap to Asheville and on to the west and Knox-
. 11 14 v1 e. A second road, dating from the early nineteenth century, proceeded
northwestward from the Public Square along North Main Street, across the
French Broad and into Tennessee. 15 These and other early roads to follow,
however, were passable to only the most stalwart, long- suffering, and deter-mined
of men. The completion then of the Buncombe Turnpike in 1827 from
Saluda northward through Asheville, Warm Springs [now Hot Springs], and
into Tennessee at Paint Rock was considered a major achievement in road-
16 building and considerably increased travel through western North Carolina.
Between the completion of the Buncombe Turnpike and the advent of the
railroads in the 1880s, prodigious droves of livestock and poultry were
driven on foot southward from Tennessee and Kentucky through Buncombe,
bound for markets in South Carolina and Georgia. Buncombites throve in
supplying feed and accomodations to the migratory hordes of men and ani-
17 mals. They would soon turn their endeavors toward a more refined clientele.
6
Since soon after the turn of the nineteenth century , a trickle of
summer visitors had begun to make their way from South Carolina and Geor-gia
to the Asheville and Warm Springs areas in search of comfort and
recreation. By 1820 Asheville was also gaining celebrity as a health
resort , particularly for consumptives. The numbers of both the vaca-tioners
and the migrant ailing were swelled appreciably by completion
f h B b T . k 18 o t e uncom e urnp~ e.
It was the advent of rail travel in the 1880s, however, which enabled
Asheville to become a major resort and health center . At the close of the
Civil War, Asheville had stood sixty miles distant from railheads in Morgan-ton,
North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, and Greeneville, Tennessee.
The long-delayed Western North Carolina Railroad from Salisbury through
Statesville, Morganton, and Old Fort, finally broke through to Asheville in
1880. Connections with the south followed in 1886 with the completion of
19 the Asheville-Spartanburg line. Among other developments, the opening
of the Battery Park Hotel in 1886 and the completion of George W. Vander-built's
palacial Biltmore House in 1895 signaled Asheville's triumphant ar-rival
on the social and financial scene, and set in motion forces of growth
and change which would not spend themselves until the late 1920s.
Several of those associated with the future Old Kentucky Home played
significant parts in laying the financial and mercantile foundations for a
growing Asheville; others, like Julia E. Wo l fe, who followed them, opened
its doors to the rapidly increasing numbers flocking to Asheville in search
of health and recreation . Among the former was Erwin Sluder, the man who
erected the original house on Spruce Stre~t . His gravestone in Asheville~s
Riverside Cemetery indicates that he lived from 1824 to 1885. By the time
of the housets construction he had long since established himself as one of
western North Carolina\s lead~g p~~y~te bankers, haying set up for busi-
20 ness on the Public Square soon after the Civil war. The Census of 1880
listed Sluder as a banker, age fifty-six , with four children. Listed as
members of his household were, besides his immediate family, a niece, two
21 boarders (a teacher and a dentist), and two servants. In 1884 he took
as his partner W. W. Barnar d . 22 Barnard was Sluder ' s son- in-law , the
husband of his eldest child Cordelia (Cordie) . 23
On January 13, 1884 Sluder sold the property on Spruce Street to his
24 daughter and son-in-law for $3,500. Apparently, however, the couple had
been living in the house since its completion, as indicated by Asheville's
first City Directory, published in October of 1883. 25 Erwin Sluder's resi­dence
, on the other hand, was given as North Main Street in 1883. 26 Very
probably Sluder never resided in the house he had built. By 1883 he was a
prominent Asheville citizen in the fifty-ninth year of his age with a well
established household; his daughter, Cordie, according to the Census of
1880, would have been nineteen the year the house was built; and it was the
Barnards , not the Sluder s, who were listed as residents of Spruce Street
in 1883. It is reasonable to suppose , then, that the house was built for
the newly married couple by Erwin Sluder and sold to them the following
January shortly before his death.
7
W. W. Barnard (1858-1944) 27 was a leading buyer and warehouseman during
Asheville's thriving tobacco marketing period in the 1880s. 28 Having been
made a partner in his father-in-law's banking concern in 1884, he continued
to prosper in that profession after Sluder ' s death the following year . By
1890 he had risen to the vice-presidency of the National Bank of Asheville,
and from 1892 to 1896 served as president of that bank. 29 Barnard and his
wife possessed the property until April 1: 1884, when, for some reason,
30 they sold the house to one J. H. Herring for $3,600. Of Herring little
can be learned except that in 1887 he was carrying on a trade in shoes and
boots in the Herring and Weaver Shoe Store at 30 South Main Street . 31
After less than a year, on March 14, 1885, Herring relinquished the house
32 to Cordie Barnard for $3,390 . By 1890 Herring vanished from the city
directories, presumably having died or moved away.
From March 14, 1885 until July 13, 1889 the house remained in the
Barnards' hands. The City Directory of 1887 indicates that, after the
death of Erwin Sluder, several members of his family moved into the Spruce
33 Street house with the Barnards. The next change of ownership came with
the Barnards' sale of the house to Mrs. Alice Johnston Reynolds, a
widow, on July 13, 1889 for the muchincreased purchase price of $7,500. 34
It should be noted that the original house had apparently seen a massive
addition during the period of the Barnards' residence, the price of the
house having more than doubled between 1885 and 1889.
It was during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership that the house
definitely began to be operated as a boarding house . Within one year
after her purchase, the City Directory of 1890, in the classified ads,
listed the residence as a boarding house '~y permission . " 35 Under Mrs.
Reynolds' personal proprietorship and that of others to whom she apparently
leased the house, 48 Spruce Street took in boarders from 1890 to 1900. An
1893 information booklet for the promotion of tourism contained a glowing
advertisement for Mrs. Reynolds' boarding house. 36 Three years later,
though still referred to as the Reynolds, the house was accepting board-ers
under the proprietorship of Mrs. Leah I. Drake, whose advertise-
8
•
ment was inserted in the City Directory of 1896. 37 Subsequent proprietors
during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership were Mrs. W. 0 . Hudson in
189938 and Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth in 1900.
39
By July of 1900 Mrs. Reynolds had died·; her brother, Dr . Carl V.
Reynolds, acting in the capacity of executor of her estate, sold the
house on the twenty seventh day of that month to the Reverend Thomas M.
40 Myers and his long-suffering wife, Mary, for $5,000. At the ti.me of this
transaction, Dr. Reynolds was carrying on his medical practice in the
Barnard Building in Asheville. 41 He subsequently went on to distinguish
42
himself in the practice of medicine on both the local and state levels.
The Reverend T. M. Myers, from whom Julia Wolfe was to purchase the
Old Kentucky Home, seems to have been a colorful and restless man with
more than three decades in the service of God to his credit . Re was,
however, flawed by a propensity for strong drink and by a dubious mental
constitution, at least in his declining years . Mrs. Wolfe later recalled
that he was
A man from Kentucky . He was a lecturer , a Campbellite preacher
[he is sometimes remembered, with less likelihood , as having
been a Methodist], and a very brainy man at one time, but he 43
snapped several times they said, and had to go to an institution.
In August of 1898, two years before his purchase of the Spruce Street
property, the Reverend Myers purchased a large farm near Asheville which he
dubbed the "Old Kentucky Home," the name he would soon after confer on the
boarding house. 44 For reasons best known to himself, Foster A. Sondley re-corded
the Reverend Myers' undistinguished exclamation alone, of all those
9
which must have found voice on that day in 1887, when Asheville's first elec-tric
street railway car lurched forward, aided by neither animal nor steam
power, on its maiden journey from the Public Square southward to Biltmore. 45
Wolfe later drew the Reverend Myers' portrait as the "Reverend Wellington
Hodge" in Look Homeward, Angel, making mention of some of the haunting memo-ries
which Myers had of the Old Kentucky Home and which helped motivate his
sale of the house to Mrs. Wolfe. 46 The Old Kentucky Home was operated by
several proprietors during the six years of Myers" ownership. In 1900, the
year of Myers' purchase of the house and the year of Thomas Wolfe's birth,
10
the proprietor was Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth. 47
In August of 1902 Myers leased
the house to one C. J. Jeffress for $900 with an option to buy.48 In 1904
Edward T. and Mary B. Green were acting as proprietors; 49 and in 1906, the
year of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase, Thomas W. and Elsie C. King kept the house
for boarders. 50
For more than two decades after the construction of their future house
on Spruce Street, the Wolfe residence was located a short distance away at
92 Woodfin Street. Some account must be given of the Woodfin Street house,
for it was there that all of the Wolfe children were born, it was there that
the Wolfes' family life most nearly approached congeniality and cohesiveness,
and it was there that Thomas Wolfe's fondest memories of childhood originated.
The man who was to build the Woodfin Street house with his own hands,
William Oliver Wolfe, was born near York Springs, Pennsylvania on April 10,
1851, the son of Jacob Wolf (W. 0. later added the "e") and the former
Eleanor Jane Heikes (or Heikus). Shortly after the Civil War, he had struck
out for Baltimore, where he had found employment with Sisson and King's
Monument Works. During the years of his apprenticeship, Wolfe lived in a
Baltimore boarding house, the Streeter Hotel, from whose irascible proprietor,
Joe Streeter, he may have acquired some of his relishment for the hyperbolic,
the dramatic, and the profane. Upon completion of his apprenticeship in
Baltimore, the stone cutter came south with his younger brother, Elmer,
to work on the column friezes of the capitol building in Columbia, South
Carolina. In something under a year, the work completed, the two
moved northward to Raleigh, where they applied their craft to the con­struction
of the state insane asylum and other buildings currently under
way. By 1871 his brother Elmer had departed for Ohio, and W. 0. Wolfe
had established his own place of business in Raleigh at the corner of
South Blount and East Morgan Streets. On October 9, 1873, the twenty- two
year old Wolfe and a nineteen year old Raleigh girl, Hattie Watson, were
joined in wedlock. Of this, the first of Wolfets three ill-fated marriages,
little can be learned, save that it soon ended in divorce .
In 1879 Wolfe married Cynthia Hill, the daughter of his landlady and
eight years his senior. Shortly thereafter, during theLr first year of
marriage, Cynthia's worsening tubercular condition resolved the couple to
leave Raleigh and take up residence in Asheville. Arriving in Asheville
some time before her husband, Cynthia Wolfe set up as a milliner. W. 0.
51 followed as soon as his business affairs in Raleigh were settled.
The Census of 1880, besides W. 0 . and Cythia Wolfe, lists his mother-in-
law, Mrs. Allen, his brother Wesley, a plasterer, and one Negro servant
as members of theW. 0. Wolfe household. 52 Julia Wolfe would later recall
that W. 0. and Cynthia Wolfe had lived briefly in two rented rooms on
North Main Street before construction of the Woodfin Street house. 53 The
information in the Census of 1880, however, indicates that larger quarters
must have been occupied at that ttme.
In any event, W. 0 . and Cynthia Wolfe seem to have been unable to
11
•
locate a house which suited them, and decided to purchase a piece of land
and erect their own house . On October 10, 1881 W. 0. Wolfe purchased the
lot on Woodfin Street from J. M. and S. E. Israel for $300. 54 With the
help of several men whom he had hired, Wolfe completed the building of
the house soon after purchase of the land. But Cynthia Wolfe's health
did not improve as hoped. After less than three years in the house her
husband had built for her, she passed away on February 22, 1884. 55
During the brief period that Cynthia Wolfe operated her millinery
shop in Asheville , she bacame acquainted with Julia Elizabeth Westall,
the future Julia E. Wolfe. Indeed, it was in Cynthia ' s shop that the
future marriage partners first met. Sometime thereafter, probably in
the summer of 1884, a more serious acquaintance was set on foot when the
redoubtable stone cutter was accosted in his shop by Miss Westall, a
school teacher and part- time bookseller, in search of a new customer.
Julia E. Westall had been born at Swannanoa in 1860, the product of
Major Thomas Casey Westall's second marriage . She was almost entirely
self-educated in her early youth, having received little or no formal
schooling on the primary and secondary levels. After a year and a
half's attendance at Asheville Female College and Judson College in
Hendersonville, she was able to establish herself as a rural school
teacher in Yancey and later Mitchell counties 9 and supplemented her
income by selling books during the summer . 56
Thus the union which would one day produce one of America~s great
novelists was begun on a basis of buying, selling, lending, and discussing
books. Mrs. Wolfe later recalled that her future husband had initiated
his proposal, in the parlor of the Woodfin Street house, by explaining
12
•
13
that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Allen, was soon to return to Raleigh and that
he was therefore obliged either to remarry or break up housekeeping for
want of assistance. Wolfe's pragmatic solution was not immediately accepted,
but at length his presumption and persistence won her over. On January 14,
1885, at the home of the bride's father, the two were joined in holy matri-
57 mony. It was to prove , as Andrew Turnbull so aptly described it, "an
epic misalliance."58
A numerous progeny soon began to issue forth. The first child, Leslie,
a girl who died in infancy , was born October 18, 1885, only nine months and
four days after the wedding. Seven other children and numerous miscarriages
followed, all placing in extreme jeopardy the allegation of impotency report-
59 edly leveled at W. 0. Wolfe by his first wife, Hattie Watson. Like
Lesl ie before them, all the Wolfe children were born in Julia Wolfe's
upstairs bedroom at the front of the house: Effie on June 7, 1887, Frank
on November 25, 1888, Mabel on September 25, 1890, the twins--Grover and
Benjamin--on October 27 , 1892, Fred on July 15, 1894, and Thomas Clayton
on October 3, 190o. 60
It was in the Woodfin Street rather than the Spruce Street house that
Mrs. Wolfe prepared the sumptuous breakfasts and W. 0. prepared the Satanic
fir es described with such nostalgic vigor by his youngest child:
1--;
Of, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there! To feel the
fire full chimney- throat roar up a - tremble with the blast of his
terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen
range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of
breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed ! Oh,
to hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous
hoarse frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous mutter­ing
mounting to faint howls as with infuriating relish he prepared
the roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him mutter­ing
as the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him
growling as savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimney­throat,
to hear his giant stride racing through the house pre­pared
now, storming to the charge , and the well-remembered howl
of his awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the backroom stairs he flung it open, yelling at them to awake . 61
Only occasionally in later years would he ignite a conflagration in the
Old Kentucky Home sufficient to kindle memories of his previous efforts . 62
It was in emulation of her absent father that Effie came near to
burning the Woodfin Street house to the ground. In the late 1890s the
restless and "far-wandering" W. 0. Wolfe had left Asheville for a three-month
jaunt to California. Mrs. Wolfe had gone downtown to her husband ' s
place of business, having left Effie charged with the responsibility of
keeping a low fire burning in the kitchen range. Following her father's
examples , she doused the slackening flame with a can of kerosine, drawn
from the drum on the back porch. The ensuing blaze badly damaged the
rear of the house on both £loors and , for a while, bade fare to destroy
the entire structure. The frugal and enterprising Mrs. Wolfe set carpen-ters
to the task of rebuilding almost at once. With the help of her
brothers, W. H. and J. M. Westall (both in the building supply and con-struction
business) the work was completed according to the original plan
in a matter of weeks. W. 0. Wolfe was told nothing of the incident until
his return to Asheville. 63
Mrs. Wolfe, in fact, had not had her husband's house repaired, but
her own . Ironically , the house referred to as "Papa's house" or in Thomas
Wolfe ' s writings as "Gant's house," had been purchased by Mrs. Wolfe from
her husband on October 26, 1886 for $2,000. 64 Moreover, it appears that
Mrs. Wolfe took some few boarders into the house the summer of 1886, fol­lowing
the death of their first child.65 Happily this precedent was not
followed thereafter in the Woodfin Street house; but it can be seen as a
harbinger of things to come eighteen years later with Mrs. Wolfe~s boarding
14
•
house venture in St. Louis and twenty years later with the purchase of
the Old Kentucky Home.
The Woodfin Street home was a well-constructed two- story structure of
seven rooms. It was said to be the first house in Asheville with a "ce­ment
finish, " a finish designed to simulate brownstone. A large front
porch, high off the ground, stretched across the front and down both sides
of the house. Beneath the house was a dirt- floored cellar used for the
storage of fruits and vegetables. The first floor contained four rooms,
including the kitchen. As one entered the downstairs hall from the front
porch, the parlor was on the right . It contained a suit of upholstered
furniture, a what-not filled with shells, curios, and carved marble, a
mantel piece adorned by figurines, and a marble top table , above which
15
was suspended a pull-down crystal lamp. The floor of the parlor was covered
with a tan Belgian carpet decorated with gold and pink rose clusters. In
the ceiling of the parlor and the hallway were medallions fashioned by
W. 0. Wolfe. To the rear of the parlor was the living room, which had
been originally a bedroom. A side door opened from the living room onto
the side porch. Across the hall, opposite the parlor, was the dining
room, which contained a long extendable table capable of seating fourteen
people. Behind the dining room was the kitchen where the fondly remem-bered
Woodfin Street meals were prepared. Upstairs were three bedrooms .
Mrs. Wolfe' s stood over the parlor at the front of the house . Mr. Wolfets
room was opposite hers, across the small hallway. The childrents room was
on the right rear of the house above the living room. A staircase evi­dently
led down from the children~s room to the back porch. The house was
heated entirely by four fireplaces, one in each of the three rooms downstairs,
excluding the kitchen, and the fourth in Mrs. Wolfets bedroom upstairs .
The house contained no plumbing. 66
The front yard on Woodfin Street was small but verdant. Steps led
down from the lofty front porch to a marble walkway, which spanned the
short distance of about thirty feet from the foot of the steps to the
wood and later iron fence. The front yard was fifty feet in width and
was heavily planted in a variety of flowers and shrubs . As a general
rule the children were not allowed to play in the front yard, but the
spacious back yard afforded ample opportunity for play. Although only
fifty feet wide, the back yard ran back more than two hundred and fifty
feet from the street and featured a variety of fruit trees, a vegetable
garden, and a swing for the children.
A further attraction of the back yard on Woodfin Street was the one
room playhouse which now stands to the left rear of the Old Kentucky Home.
The playhouse was built by W. 0. Wolfe with pine lumber about the turn
of the century, and was placed behind the right rear or northeast corner
67
of the main house. A plank walkway led from the front of the main house
to the doorway of the playhouse. The younger children spent many hours
there, especially during inclement weather or on Sunday afternoons when
W. 0. Wolfe craved surcease of noise within the main hous·e. The play-house
contained chairs, a couch., a stove, an atlas, a large blackboard,
and Mrs. Wolfe ' s old Estey organ, which she had obtained before her mar-riage
while teaching school in Mitchell County. Tom especially enjoyed
the playhouse, seeking there the solitude denied ~ elsewhere. When stay-
16
ing on Woodfin Street the children could jump from the window of the back
bedroom onto the roof of the playhouse and from there to the ground below. 68
The Woodfin Street house was situated between the J . M. Israels ' modest
house on the west and the grand brick house of the E. W. Hazzards on the
east. It was in the driveway of the Hazzards house that the young Thomas
69 Wolfe was near ly run over and killed by a horse and delivery wagon. But
more than a driveway separated the Wolfe's from the Razzards; the two fami-lies
lived on different planes. The Hazzards were a wealthy South Carolina
17
family from near Charleston. Normally they rented the house to others while
living elsewhere. For several years during Wolfe's early youth the house
was occupied by the Oliver Cromwell famil y of Philadelphia, which had come
to Asheville for Mr. Cromwell ' s failing health. The three Cromwell child-ren
were frequent playmates for the younger Wolfe children. James Cromwell
would one day marry Doris Duke, and his sister Louise was to become the
70 fir st wife of Douglas MacArthur. The young Thomas Wolfe's c losest friends
on Woodfin Street were Charles Perkinson, son of the T. J. Perk.insons across
the street and Max Israel, son of the J . M. Israels next door . Though
turbulent even in the early years, Wolfe's childhood was at its best
on Woodfin Street.
Julia Wolfe, however, was never entirely at ease on Woodfin Street .
There she was constantly reminded, at times by W. 0 . Wolfe in no uncertain
terms, that the house had been built for another woman . Indeed, some of
the furniture and bric- a-brac in the house had been brought by Cynthia Hill
from Raleigh. W. 0 . Wolfe may have promised to build a house for his new
wife on a large lot he had acquired on Merriman Avenue; if so , the promise
71 was never kept. Julia Wolfe had ample cause for discontent~ent under
her husband's roof , besides the c onstant reminders of his former marriage.
In real life W. 0. Wolfe was a physically imposing, rather impeccable,
man of six feet four inches, with a decided proclivity for oratory, hyper-bole,
and genial profanity . There was about him a feeling of zestful
restlessness, unpredictable expansiveness, and undifferentiated frus ­tration.
Had he chosen another path, he might well have made his mark
as an actor or lawyer. Though lacking in formal education, he had ac­quired
an appreciation of cultural and intellectual pursuits. A man of
gifted memory, Wolfe indulged his flair for the dramatic with long pas­sages
of poetry and scripture. In many ways he was an appealing and
colorful man . But his periodic drunkeness and riotous adultery , together
with occasional threats of physical violence against his wife and her to·o
numerous offspring were, for Mrs. Wolfe, recurring causes of embarrass­ment,
degradation, and anxiety.
For his part, the Olympian W. 0 . Wolfe could not abide his wife ' s
small mindedness, her unpleasant and frenetic mannerism of speech and
gesture, her growing acquisitiveness, her inchoate mysticism, her petty
selfishness, and her suffocating niggardliness. Moreover, Mrs. Wolfe was
of a fiercely self-reliant nature, and, under the circumstances, fostered
a desire to assert her indpendence. At length the unhappy un.ion was to be
severed in such a way as to allow Mrs. Wolfe an opportunity both to flee
her husband's hearth and give vent to her mounting mania for real estate
speculation.
The eventual purchase of the Old Kentucky Home and the consequent
destruction of a cohesive family life should be seen against the back­ground
of both the growing gulf between the ill-mated marriage partners
and Asheville ' s mushrooming growth as a tourist and health resort. By
18
the early years of this century Asheville was attracting thousands in search
of health and recreation . Asheville was becoming a town on the make, and
had begun the transformation which its most famous son would later deplore:
New people were coming to town all the time, new faces were
being seen upon the streets. There was quite a general feeling
in the air that g r eat events were just around the corner, and
that a bright destiny was in store for Libya Rill.
It was a time when they were just hatching from the shel l ,
when the place was changing from a little isolated mountain
village, lost to the world, with its few thousand native population,
to a briskly moving modern town, with railway connections to all
parts, and with a growing population of wealthy people who had
heard about the beauties of the setting and were coming there to
live.72
Hotels and boar ding houses were rapidly proliferating to meet the
growing demand for accomodations. As early as 1898 the Ashevill e Board
of Trade was promoting tourism and describing the boarding houses of
the area in glowing terms :
Scores of home - like boarding houses are here; excellent modern
f l ats and beautiful private residences, occupied by r efined,
cultured people, many of whom are persons of wealth.73
19
By about 1910 the Board of Trade was claiming nineteen hotels for Asheville
with rates ranging from $1 . 00 to $6.00 a day, in addition to the "scores
of homelike boarding houses [which] offer choice accomodations at from
$6 . 00 to 14 . 00 per week."74 It was estimated at this time that " The hotel
and boarding house capacity approaches an aggregate of 12,000 to 15,000 ."75
By 1920 , the effective end of Thomas Wolfe's life in Asheville, the Board
of Trade was advertising hotel rates from $2.50 to $10 . 00 a day and up ,
while boarding houses were said to offer room and board ranging from
76 $15.00 to $25.00 a week. Accomodations at the Old Kentucky Home we r e
never to fetch such a price.
Julia Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home was preceded by
experience as a boarding house keeper during the summer of 1904 at the
St. Louis World's Fair. According to one of Mrs. Wolfe's accounts, the
initiative for her undertaking the St . Louis venture had come in part
from her husband. By this account, Mr. Wolfe had taken the Keeley Cure
•
for alcoholism about 1901 and for several years had been ab l e to control
his drinking. Yet he had grown increasingly restive beneath the burden
of his large family and had encouraged his wife to bring in some additional
income. This, she later claimed, had been an important factor in her de­cision.
A further inducement for Mrs. Wolfe, according to one account,
was the reported success enjoyed by Governor Elias Carr's sister as a
boarding house keeper during the Chicago Worldls Fair of 1893. 77
In the spring of 1904 Mrs. Wolfe journeyed to St. Louis with all of
the children except Frank and Effie, who remained in Asheville with their
father . She had taken a six-month lease on the house of Dr. Paul Paquin
of St . Louis, who was to be out of town for a year and whose brother, also
a physician, Mrs . Wolfe was acquainted with in Asheville. The house was
located at 5095 Fairmont Avenue, on the corner of Fairmont and Academy
Street. Until November Mrs. Wolfe operated the residence as the North
Carolina House for those visiting the World•s Fair. Many of her tenants ·
were North Carolinians. Her otherwise profitable St . Louis venture was
marred and terminated by the death of Grover there on November 16. Upon
notification of the boy's death, W. 0. Wolfe came out to St. Louis and
the family returned to Asheville with the body . The death of Grover,
like the death of Ben fourteen years later, left a definite mark on the
life of the Wolfe family. From time to time in subsequent years, W. 0.
Wolfe would denounce his wife's St. Louis enterprise, holding her respon­sible
for the death of the boy whom both regarded as the brightest and
most promising of the children. 78
The death of Grover and the subsequent recriminations placed further
strains on Julia Wolfe's tolerance for the Woodfin Street house and
20
•
79 helped assure her permanent departure . Soon after the family ' s return
from St. Louis, Mrs. Wolfe began looking for a likely boarding house in-vestment.
Late in the summer of 1906 one Jack Campbell, a real estate
agent, came by the house on Woodfin Street to inform Mrs. Wolfe of the
house which the Reverend Myers was placing on the market. After being
shown through the house by Mrs. Myers, Julia Wolfe approached her husband
on its purchase. The harassed W. 0. Wolfe seems to have acquiesed in a
spirit of resignation and perhaps relief: uJack, she wants it, make the
papers out to her. 80 If she is satisfied , I dontt care. " According to
Mrs. Wolfe's recollections, the papers for transfer of ownership were
drawn up and signed the following. day in the offices of the law firm of
Bernard and Bernard . At the time of the purchase, the house already con­tained
nineteen boarders paying $8 . 00 a week. 81 The Reverend Myers had
21
already dubbed the house the Old Kentucky Home, in honor of his home state,
82 and requested that the name be retained. Only occasionally, during the
temporary proprietorship of short-term lessees, was the name ever changed
ther eafter.
The deed of August 30, 1906 conveyed ownership of the Old Kentucky
Home to Julia E. Wolfe for a purchase price of $6,500 . The property was
described as being free of all encumbrances "excepting certain unpaid
paving and sewer assessments," for work that had been recently done and
f h . h M W lf d .hili 83 f $2 000 or w 1c r s . o e assume respons1 ty. A down payment o ,
was required. By this time Mrs. Wolfe had accumulated $1,700 for the
purchase of a boarding house, including the profit of about $500 from
the summer in St. Louis. The balance was to be paid off at a rate of
$500 every six months . W. 0. Wolfe was prevailed upon to lend hts wife
the balance of the money down required, and, in l ess than a week after
84 the sale, she took actual possession of the house.
•
22
Quietly but decisively the family had been cleft in twain. There-after
its members were to shuttle for many years between two houses,
neither of which was a home. At first and briefly, Mrs. ~olfe exerted
some effort to operate her newly acquired business while remaining on
Woodfin Street, walking back and forth between the two houses in the early
morning before breakfast and late evening after supper. The family adapted
to this arrangement after a fashion by taking their lunches and suppers at
the Old Kentucky Home. After only about six weeks of commuting between
the two houses, Mrs . Wolfe was afflicted with a seriously infected leg
and began to sleep in the boarding house. For some weeks she was obliged
to conduct her boarding house business from a wheel chair; but she did
not return again to Woodfin Street and her husband. Thus, from about
October of 1906 the family bonds were permanently severed. Mrs . Wolfe
later claimed that, at first, her husband did not seem to mind her living
apart and had even seemed to relish his intercourse with the boarders.
If this is true, his attitude altered quickly and permanently, as she
later owned :
But as time went on he declared that I had made a mistake in
breaking up the home which I admit was true, scattering the
family, trying to live in two houses.85
For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home,
the children drifted back and forth between the two houses, depending on
whim, domestic circumstances, and the tourist season. A study of the Ashe-ville
city directories for the years 1906 to 1918 unfolds a bewildering and
frenetic alteration of living arrangements, remarkable for a single family.
Family correspondence of the period reveals a similar picture. Addresses
changed irregularly with the years and seasons, and it was not unusual for
members of the family, writing from out of town, to express uncertainty as
to where the various family members were currently to be found.
23
The chief source of information for Thomas Wolfets youth and for life
within the Old Kentucky Home must, of course, be Look Homeward 1 Angel. Des -
pite Wolfe's disingenuous evasiveness on the point and the recurring dis-claimers
of other family members, the novel's depiction of people, places,
and events is remarkable for its accuracy and detail. Wolfe was very tender
to the accusation that he was merely transcribing actual memories into prose ,
feeling that such an admission would seriously undermine and diminish his
role as a creative and imaginative artist. But one thing after another from
the book can be or has been verified. The experiences of Wolfe's protago-nist,
Eugene Gant, and of Wolfe himself are, on the whole, virtually iden-
86 tical. Drawing on his prodigiously retentive memory, Wolfe was able to
translate the recollections of his youth with amazing vividness and detail:
We Wolfes, Papa and Mama and each of us children, I think, have
all been possessed of extraordinary powers of remembering. Much
of Tom's success as a writer, in my opinion , is attributable to
the fact that he never forgot anything •.•• he could sit down and
recall in elaborate detail those things he had experienced, what
he had seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt, and put them
realistically on paper. Tom's was truly a photographic memory. 87
In a letter to his mother from Harvar d, written three years before he
began Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe wrote that he had some memories of
childhood before Grover ' s death in 1904, but that after that time he was
able to trace his childhood in memory "step by step. " 88 Thirteen years
later, in The Story of a Novel, Wolfe alluded to the potentials of his
memory as a resoruce for his art:
The quality of my memory is characterized, I believe, in
a more than ordinary degree by the intensity of its sense im­pressions,
its powers to evoke and bring back the odors, sounds,
colors, shapes, and feel of things with concrete vividness.89
MOreover, Wolfe's powe r s of recalling the surroundings of his youth were
matched by his ability to recollect the faces, characteristics, and
personalities which filled thefuJ
• • • the winter boarders in a little boarding house down south
twenty years ago; Miss Florrie Mangle, the trained nurse; Miss
Jessie Rimmer, the cashier at Reeds drug store; Doctor Richards,
the clairvoyant; the pretty girl who cracked the whip and thrust
her head into the lion's mouth with Johnny J. Jones Carnival and
Combined Shows . 90
Serious students of Wolfe's life and work have found Wolfets auto-biographical
fiction approached literal truth most closely in Look Home-war
d, Angel . Elizabeth Nowell, long personally and professionally asso-ciated
with Wolfe and his most comprehensive biographer , used Look Home -
wa r d, Angel as the chief source of information for his early life , because
91 it was " so obviously autobiographical." His second and final editor ,
Edward Aswell of Harper's, declared the nove l "The most literall y auto-biographical
of his books. Nine years after Wolfe ' s death,
Maxwell Perkins of Scribner ' s, the man responsible for the publication
of Wolfe's first and best novel, recalled his initial recognition of its
factual basis :
I remember the horror with which I realized, when working with
Thomas Wolfe on his manuscript of ''The Angel, t• that all of these
people were almost completely r eal, that the book was liter all y
autobiographical.93
One Wolfe schol ar familiar with the events and sur roundings of his child-hood
has concluded that:
There are many more than 300 characters and places mentioned
by name or described in Look Homeward , Angel, and prob ab ly there
is not an entirely fict itious person, place , or incident in t he
whole novel. • • • Those migrant boarders a nd tourists who came
to the Old Kentucky Home, rocked on the front porch for a spell ,
and moved on are seldom identifiable. Wolfe remembered them,
but townspeople do not; and the minor exploits of boarders are
rarel y recorded by the papers.94
It was because of the penetrating and scathing accuracy of Wolfe ' s
portrait of Asheville that Look Homeward, Angel evoked such widespread
furor. Two decades of the town's history had been vivisected and
24
placed on display before the world; the town would not soon forgive the
apostate son who climbed the pinnacle of literary fame by flaying the
95 place of his birth. Wolfe ' s sister, Mabel, a resident of Ashevil le at
the time of the book's publication, recalled the vehemence of the city's
reaction :
The only thing, I felt, that saved us Wolfes from being
tarred and feathered was the fact that Tom had not spared us .
He had lambasted the neighbors, but he had pictured his own
family also, the community agreed, in no flattering light.96
A shudder ran through the mortified city as residents recognized them·
selves and acquaintances vividly portrayed in the pages of the book.
With only slight exaggeration, Thomas Wolfe described Asheville ' s feel-ings
t-e\.rard him in his account of "Libyan Hill ts" reaction to the pub -
lication of George Webber ' s first novel, "Home to Our Mountains":
'I have spent most of my time this past week, ' George
wrote, 'reading and rereading all the letters that my erstwhile
friends and neighbors have written me since the book came out.
And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote
is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have
been variously compa r ed to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and
Caesar's Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its
own nest , to a viper that an inocent populace had long nurtured
to its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones
of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom
nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honored dead. I
have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog deliberately and lust­fully
wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood , a rattle­snake,
a jackass , an alleycat, and a baboon ••• there have been
moments when I felt that maybe my accusers are right. • 97
In spite of his protestations of artistic integrity and wounded
innocence, Wolfe had in fact anticipated a harsh reaction by Asheville .
His notebooks clearly reveal that he had even drafted various defenses
98 against the expected onslaught before publication of the novel. Almost
certainly, however, he was astonished and dismayed by the pitch and ex-tent
of the uproar and by the agonizing slowness with which the hometown
J;esentment against him waned:
25
I had thought that there might be a hundred people in that
town who would read the book, but if there were a hundred
outside of the negr o population, the blind , and the positively
illiterate who did not read it, I do not know where they are.
For months the town seethed with a fury of resentment which
I had not believed possible.99
In the early and mid 1920s, during his first years away from Asheville,
Wolfe had been wont to see himself as the sensitive and unappreciated
artist in exile; he now found himself repudiated, disavowed, and held
in contempt by the city upon which he had previously cast his scorn.
He had hoped to prove himself to Asheville as a poet and genius, and
the city ' s rejection of him was profound diappointment. 100
At length a more mature Wolfe came to regret having given so little
quarter and not having considered the potential consequences of his book
more carefully:
I had written the book, more or less, directly from the experi­ence
of my own life, and, furthermore, I now think that I may have
written it with a certain naked intensity of spirit which is
likely to characterize the earliest work of a young writer.lOl
. . • the young writer is often led through inexperience to a use
of the materials of life which are, perhaps, somewhat too naked and
direct for the purpose of a work of art. The thing a young writer
is likely to do is to confuse the limits between actuality and
reality. He tends unconsciously to describe an event in such a way
because it actually happened that way, and from an artistic point
of view, I can now see that this is wrong. It is not, for example,
important that one remembers a beautiful woman of easy virtue as
having come from the state of Kentucky in the year 1907. She could
perfectly well have come from Idaho or Texas or Nova Scotia. The
important thing really is only to express as well as possible the
character and quality of the beautiful woman of easy virtue.l02
And so it is with some caution and much confidence one can turn to
Look Homeward, Angel for a more or less accurate representation of the
crucial role played by the Old Kentucky Home in Wolfe's youth and in
the life of the family as a whole:
26
In the young autumn when th.e maples were still full and
green •• • Eliza moved into Dixieland. There was a clangor,
excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the purchase, but
no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant and Eliza,
although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive boundary
in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of Dixie­land
evasively as 'a good investment, ' said nothing clearly. In
fact they felt their approaching separation instinctively: Eliza's
life was moving by a half-blind but inevitable gravitation toward
the centre of its desire - the exact meaning of her venture she
would have been unable to define, but she had a deep conviction
that the groping urge which had led her so blindly into death and
misery at Saint Louis had now impelled her in the right direction.
Her life was on its rails.
And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached
this complete disruption of their life together , the rooting up
of their clamerous home, when the hour of departures came, the103 elements resolved themselves immutably and without hesitation.
Family life on Woodfin Street had been tur bulent and at times trau-matic,
especially when W. 0. Wolfe embarked on his periodic and protracted
drinking bouts and gave vent to his manifold frustrations. But, on the
whole, life had been reasonably cohesive and pleasant, even though a
permanent tension had already settled between W. 0. and Julia Wolfe.
By the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, Frank
("Steve") had already taken up his drink-sodden and vagabond existence;
he descended on Asheville now only at irregular intervals, drifting in
and out of family life in the two houses. 104 Effie's ("Daisy's") marri-age
was not quite, as Wolfe writes, "growing near" at the time of pur­chase.
105 She was not to marry Fred Gambrell until September 16, 1908. 106
During the interim she remained with Mabel and their father on Woodfin
Street. 107 Leslie , the first child, h.ad by this time been dead for twenty
years. Grover had died in St . Louis two years before the purchase . Tom
was dragged umbilically to Spruce Street by his mother:
27
Eliza took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that
bound her to all the weary life of breast and cradle; he still
slept with her of nights; she was like some swimmer who ventures
out into a dark and desperate sea, not wholly trusting to her
strength and destiny, but with a slender cord bound to her which
stretches still to land .l08
Ben and Fred ("Luke") were, as in Look Homeward, Angel, "left floating
109 in limbo," drifting uncertainly between the two houses.
W. 0. Wolfe's celebrated views of the Old Kentucky Home and of
boarding house life are only slightly exaggerated and caricatured in
the novel as those of ''W. 0. Gant":
Gant had already named it ' The Bam t; in the morning now,
after his heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntl y toward
town by way of Spring Street, composing en route the invective
that he had formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would
stride through the wide ch.ill hall of Dix.ieland, busting in upon
Eliza, and two or three of the negresses, busy preparing the
morning meal for the hungry boarders who rocked energetically
upon the porch. All of the objections, all of the abuse that
had not been uttered when she bought the place, were vented
now.
''Woman, you have deserted my bed and board , you have made a
laughing stock out of me before the world, and left your cflildren
to perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would
not do to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted
me in my old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It
was a bitter day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell
upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn.
There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it
will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even
your own brothers will come near you. 'Nor beast, nor man hath
fallen so far.' "llO
With less bombast, in a letter to Tom in 1917, the actual W. 0 . Wolfe ex-pressed
his feelings toward the boarding house with simple and terse
eloquence: " There are few at O.K.H. It would be much better if none were
th ,111 ere. From time to time the exercised w. 0. Wolfe must have inveighed
against the IllOtley array of character s which inevitably found their way to
all but the most exclusive of Asheville boarding houses: "'Merciful God!'
howled Gant, 'you've had 'em all-blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards.
112 They all come here.'"
28
Doubtless W. 0. Wolfe, like Gant, enjoyed the celebrity among the
boarders which his commanding presence, dogmatic pronouncements, and
colorful and hyperbolic personality won for him:
Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would
hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the
quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his
torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his
prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.ll3
Less pleasant, indeed horrendous and humiliating, moments in the spot-light
must have been passed by W. 0. Wolfe when, in the throes of his
recurrent alcoholic seizures, he would cut a wide and abusive swath
through the boarders and seriously disrupt Mrs. Wolfe's endeavors to
114 carry on a remunerative business.
Ample evidence of other family members' disrelish of the boarding
house might easily be gleaned from Look Homeward, Angel. Virtually
every member of the family expresses himself on the subject at some point
in the novel, and I am not aware that any member of the family has had his
29
view substantially misrepresented . In a letter to Elizabeth Nowell concern-ing
Tom's infatuation with Clara Paul ("Laura James"), Mabel Wolfe Wheaton
wrote: " •.. she fitted into the boarding house business which I had
learned to hate."115 Later Mabel stated that:
• I was always more interested in 92 Woodfin than I was in 116 the Spruce Street house, even throughout the time Mama owned it.
Fred Wolfe recalled that, while the other Wolfe children were not so sensi-
117 tive on the issue as Tom, ''none of us liked to see Mama keep boarders.tt
In comparing the Old Kentucky Home with the previous residence, Fred
Wolfe remarked:
Why this is a house. That was a home. That was the scene of
our activity as children, the big Christmases, the big Fourth
of July celebrations. That's where all the food was. That's
where Mama reared us. That's where all the fruit and flowers
were. Why, that was home ..•• 118
Of all the Wolfe children, Tom seems to have been most traumatically
affected by the fractured family life and by the bleak, tumultuous ,
tawdry, and crowded life at the Old Kentucky Home:
Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland . •• he felt thwarted, netted,
trapped . He hated the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity
and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four
walls which shield us from them. He felt rather than understood,
the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives - his
spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as
there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives
could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and
perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they
had set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the
pattern.ll9
There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their
own inhabitation, no proof against the invasion of the boarders.l20
30
In contrast to the Old Kentucky Home, Thomas Wolfe would always remem -
121 ber the Woodfin Street house as expansive, warm, and hospitable. Wolfe ' s
principal biographers are agreed that the relative security and happiness
of his early youth were swept away with the purchase of the Old Kentucky
Home and the consequent disintegration of family life. 122 Like Eugene
Gant, the young Thomas Wolfe returned to his fatherts house whenever
possible:
the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and
added whimsey, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its
great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the
blistered varnish, the hot calf- skin, the comfort and abundance,
seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland • .
As a rule, it was during peak periods of the summer, when bed space was
at a premium, that Mrs. Wolfe would allow him to stay in his father's
house. The neurotic tenacity with which Mrs . Wolfe clung to her youngest
child was to permanently handicap him : "This abnormally prolonged infan­tile
relationship affected Wolfe's entire character and life."124 The
123
members of the family on Woodfin Street were very much aware of his feelings:
"[Tom] always wanted to live back home - we always left the doors un-
1 k d 11125 oc e . The separation of the family and the protracted and piti-able
deterioration of W. 0. Wolfe's health, which began less than a
decade afterward, all but destroyed the fabric of family life. For Thomas
Wolfe the results were to prove a life- long emotional instability and im-maturity,
a deep feeling of insecurity, a fear of enduring emotional
126 conmdtments, and a brooding introspectiveness. In the "Autobiographi-cal
Outline" now at Harvard which Wolfe used as a guide in the writing of
Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe noted: "After Woodfin Street
total lack of ritual in our life . •• 127
• the almost
Over the years the initial feelings of vague alienation of the Old
Kentucky Home took on a more definite shape. Like his father, Wolfe was
temperamentally and instinctively averse to certain pervasive features of
boarding house life. He detested the crass and demeaning commercialism
of "drumming up trade " with prospective boarders. He recoiled from the
enterpri se upon which his mother had embarked:
In him as in Gant , there was a silent horror of sel ling
for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one ' s
walls, to the guest, the stranger , the unknown friend from
out of the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the
broken , the knave, the harlot, and the fool.l28
Wolfe's lack of heart for drumming up trade for his mother ' s boarding
house was to be an enduring feature of his personality and character.
Mabel Wolfe Wheaton recalled that on several occasions Wolfe went to
considerable trouble to prevent his classmates at the University of North
Carolina from discovering that his mother kept a boar ding house. The
embarrassing event described in Look Homeward , Angel as having occurred
during the spring of his freshman year, seems to have had a f:trm basis in
129 fact. Mrs. Wolfe did in fact humiliate him during a visit to Chapel
31
•
Hill. The mortified and perplexed Wolfe reported the incident to his
sister at her home in Raleigh:
M-M-M- Mabel, Mable, my God, she's ruining me over at
Chapel Hill ••• I'll swear she's just r - r-ruining me with
my friends. • • • My God Mabel, do y-y-y-you know what Mama
d-d-did? Some of the fellows came to see her and when
they told her, just being p-p-p-polite, that they would
1-1-like to come to Asheville this summer, she said,
'Well, if you boys will d-d-drum me up some business
for the b- b-boarding house, I' 11 give you your b- b-board
for nothing.' I tell yoy3~-M-M-Mabel, Mama's just ruining
me over at Chapel Hill.
As a boy Wolfe found his privacy constantly intruded upon and his
spirit borne down by the petty annoyances of life in the Old Kentucky
Home. For many years he harbored a deep resentment of the numberless,
futile, demeaning, and random duties he was called upon to perform:
Eliza grumbled at the boy's laziness . She complained that
she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact,
he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of the
boarding house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy,
but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at
the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure
of daily labor.l31
This lingering resentment surfaced at other times in his work, as in the
"Three O'Clock" musings of young George Webber in The Web and the Rock:
And if there is work to do at three o'clock ••• for God's
sake give us something real to do •••• For God's sake don't
destroy the heart and hope and life and will , the brave and dream­ing
soul of man, with common, dull, soul-sickening, mean transac­tions
of these little things.l32
Another aspect of the boarding house operation in which Wolfe un-avoidably
found himself involved was his mother's perennial problems with
her hired help:
Eliza got along badly with the negroes •.•• she had never
been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or gov­ern
it graciously . She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls
constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. 133
32
Time and again Mrs. Wolfe would find herself deserted at a crucial point
in the boarding house routine and would be forced to implore Mabel's
assistance or send young Tom loathingly forth into the filth and degra-dation
of "Niggertown" in search of a wretch willing or desperate enough
to enter her dreaded employment. 134
Craving solitude, the young Thomas Wolfe would escape where he might
within the crowded vastness of the Old Kentucky Rome, at his father's
house on Woodfin Street, or in the playhouse. He employed what time and
privacy he could snatch from the bustle of family life to accomplish the
omnivorous reading which was to stand him in good stead for his life's
work. Family members joked of discovering him in secluded and unexpected
places "coiled up" and reading. Before moving on to the holdings of the
public library, Wolfe eagerly devoured his fatherts libarary on Woodfin
Street--a library remarkably rich and varied for a tradesman's library
of that day or this . The pleasure and escape which the young Wolfe found
in books was not sufficient, however, to counterbalance the hectic
drearinessand shallow turbulence of everyday family existence.
Years later, while engaged in the writing of Look Homeward, Angel,
Wolfe spoke bitterly of the trauma and sorrow of his childhood in a
letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts, the woman whose teaching and guidance
had rescued him from the ''bleak horror of Dixieland":135
You say that no one outside my family loves me more than
Margaret Roberts. Let me rather say the exact truth: - that
no one inside my family loves me as much, and only one other
person, I think, in all the world loves me as much. My book
if full of ugliness and terrible pain - and I think moments of
a great and soaring beauty. • I was without a home - a vaga-bond
since I was seven - with two roofs and no home . I moved
inward on that house of death and tumult from room to little
room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their
constant rocking on the porch. My overloaded heart was burst­ing
with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was
strangling, without speech, without articulation, in my own
33
secretions - groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes
and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward
beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed and
cheap ugliness - and then I found you, when else I should
have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light.
Do you think that I have forgotten? Do you think that
I ever will?l36
The year preceding the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe felt
it necessary to assure his mother that he had not irreconcilably turned
his back on his family:
I want to tell you something very plainly: I am not trying
to avoid seeing any of you . • • . There has been no evasion.
And, in spite of an ugly and rancorous feeling towards me which
may exist in the family - a dislike which most of us feel for
anything that is strange to us, remote from our experience, and
living on a separate level of thought and feeling - I want to
see you all very much - no matter howmuch pain and ugliness
I may have to remember.l37
It would be a mistake to represent Wolfe's childhood, after the pur-chase
of the Old Kentucky Home, as a protracted period of utter bleakness
and unhappiness. There were occasional good times still for the boy and
his family. At times the volatile children and parents blended harmoni.-
ously together. There were scattered peri.ods of espri.t and genuine en-joyment
of each other's company . Sometimes the mi.x of personalities in
the Old Kentucky Home would result in an agreeable rapport between the
Wolfes and their boarders. Wolfe forever retained fond memories of the
family and boarders gathered around the piano in the parlor, as Mabel
played and sang perennial favorites:
On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the
cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her
strong vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertoryof songs
classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft
cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders , and ~I Wonder Who's
Kissing Her Now, ,. which Gant demanded over and over; 'Love Me and
the World is Minet: ~Till the ~ands of the Desert Grow Cold';
'Dear Old Girl, the Rob-bin Sings Aoove You'; ~The End of a Perfect
Day, t and t Alexander ~s Rag-Time Band,,. wlrlch Luke had practised
in a tortured house for weeks~ and sung with thunderous success
in the high schoo1Minstrels.l~8
34
He listened with awed attentiveness as his father indulged his flair for
oratory and declamation or recited long passages of Gray, Tennyson, Scott,
Shakespeare, and others from memory. For several years after the purchase
of the Old Kentucky Home, he accompanied his mother on long extended trips
to Washington, Memphis, Hot Springs, Florida, and elsewhere.139 These
trips whetted an appetite for travel which, in his adult life, was seldom
sated, and afforded a welcome relief from the hectic unpleasantness of
boarding house life.
Notwithstanding the excess of sadness over joy in the future novel-ist's
life at the Old Kentucky Rome, the boarding house played a crucial
role in forcing his interaction with a colorful and unending parade of
personalities and characters of every possible description. Each of the
varying personages with which he came in contact might one day prove
useful to the writer; some were also meaningful and important to a sensi-ti
ve and insecure young man. According to Look Homeward , Angel, Wolfe
struck up a close friendship at the Old Kentucky Home during the summer
of 1914 with a spinster school teacher from New York. 140 The consolation
and understanding of a regular boarder from Florida, represented by Wolfe
as "Miss Irene Mallard," helped guide him through a difficult period of
his youth and afforded him a companionship which he sorely needed on at
least two occasions. 141 Doubtless there were many others over the years
with whom Wolfe formed lasting and heart-felt associations.
The Old Kentucky Rome brought him the poignant summer interlude with
Clara Paul from Washington, North Carolina, represented as "Laura James"
from "Little Richmond" in Look Homeward, Angel. Clara Paul was twenty-one
years old. She had come to Asheville with her ten year old brother because
of his ill health. Moreover, she was already promised to another, and,
35
after a brief stay at the Old Kentucky Home , she returned to Washington
and was married. Two years later she was to die of influenza. Wolfe con­siderably
fictionalized his account of the bitter-sweet romance in Look
Homeward, Angel; in truth it seems to have been an unconsumated infatua-
142
tion between a teenage boy and a young woman whom he knew to be engaged.
Less innocent, but not less instructive, were the brief encounters at
the Old Kentucky Home with women of easier virtue. Several episodes of
both active and passive seduction were recorded in Look Homeward , Angel~
such as the interludes with the incognito and mysterious prostitute '~ss
Brown" and the middle-aged dentist's wife from South Carolina, with whom
he carried on illicitly during the summer of 1920, until her consequent
143 ejection from the house by Mrs. Wolfe.
The passing parade of boarders through the years provided the future
novelist with an almost endless array of colorful and varied charcters,
faces, and memories from which to draw: The Ohio woman who died of typhoid
and whose distraught husband ''came quickly out into the hall and dropped
36
his hands"; the "thin-faced Jew" on the upstairs sleeping porch who "coughed
through the interminable dark"; the lunatic "mul-tye-millionaire, Mr. Simon";
"Miss Billie Edwards . • • , the daring and masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L.
Jones Combined Shows"; ''Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant
and usually absent drug salesman," who had an affair with Ben; ''Mr. Conway
Richards, candy wheel concQssionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined
Shows"; "Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse"; "Mr . William H.
Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,'' cotton grower, banker,
and sufferer from malaria; '~ss Annie Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta,
Georgia"; '~ss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina";
''Mrs . Rose Levin , twenty- eight, of Chicago, Illinois"; 11Miss Malone, the
gaunt drug- eater with the loose gray lips"; " Fowler, a civil engineer • • •
who came and departed quickly leaving a sodden stench of cornwhiskey in
his wake"; ' 'Mary Thomas, a tall, jolly, young prostitute who came from
Kentucky," who was a friend of "Helen's"; and the tall, mysterious ,
seductive, and adulterous Mrs. Selborne from South Carolina, who had a
b rief affair with "Steve" her fir st sununer in the Old Kentucky Home and
whose Negro cook ''W. 0. Gant" attempted unsuccessfully and disastrously
to seduce in the playhouse on Woodfin Street. 144
Wolfe would remember the winters in the Old Kentucky Home as periods
37
of frigid bleakness:
In the winter a few chil l boarders, those faces, those per­sonalities
which became mediocre through repetition , sat f or
hours before the coals of the parl or hearth , rocking inter min­ably,
dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with them­selves
and Dixieland, no doubt, as he [Eugene] with them. l45
The sununers, though crowded, hectic, and bereft of privacy, teemed
with impressions at once sensual and sensuous, which were stored up in the
capacious cache of Wolfe ' s memory:
There came slow- bodied women from the hot rich South, dark­haired
white bodied girls from New Orleans, com- haired blondes
from Georgia, nigger- drawling desire from South Carolina. And
there was malarial l assitude tinged faintly with yellow , from
Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced South
Carolinean, with n .icotined fingers, took him daily to baseball
games; a lank yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed
hills and wandered through the fragrant mountain valleys with
him, of nights he heard the rich laughter of the women, tender
and cruel, upon the d ark por ches , heard the florid throat tones
of the men; saw the yielding stealthy harlotry of the Sout h -
the dark secl usion of their midnight bodies, their morning
innocence . l46
In spite of its tumult, its sordidness, its lack of privacy, its petty
annoyance, and its emotional deprivation , boarding house life could not but
contribute vivid color and emotive intensity to the work of an autobio-graphical
novelist :
•
• • • the artist in him was bound to profit from the assortment
of types that came to the Old Kentucky Home, just as his being
born into a large, tempestuous family was a great human and
psychological advantage, much as he suffered from their out­bursts.
l47
The Old Kentucky Home, of course, figures most prominently in Look
Homeward, Angel as 11Dixieland. " It is the very hub around which the Gant
saga revolves:
The Old Kentucky home is so much like Dixieland that one who
enters the house for the first time feels as if he were re­reading
the book. Wolfe has described minutely and accurately
the rooms and furniture of the old boardinghouse.l48
The house plays an important part again in Of Time and the River, parti-cularly
as the scene of his father's continued decline and death. In
the two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home
Again, Wolfe, always sensitive to the accusation of being too autobio-graphical,
attempted to reduce and alter the almost literal transcription
38
of his memories into prose. Rather clumsily and transparently, he changed
the name of his protagonist from Eugene Gant to George Webber, and made
other changes in a misguided attempt to diverge from authobiography. These
attempts, however, were neither thorough-going, consistent, nor successful.
In spite of increasing endeavors to create r~ther than record, in spite of
changes in names and background, George Webber was almost as surely Thomas
Wolfe as Eugene Gant had been, and "Libya Hill" nearly as faithful a
rendering of Asheville as "Altamont" had been.
Ostensibly the old boarding house disappeared from his later work. In
The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again the house of George Webber's
youth is depicted as a small one-story house on Locust S~reet, built by his
Aunt Maw's father, Lafayette Yoy.ner. But, not unlike the Old Kentucky Home,
•
39
the house is described as being of frame construction with a porch, gables,
and bay windows . 149 In The Web and the Rock Wolfe overlapped Look Homeward,
Angel chronol ogically by creating a new youth for his protagonist. George
Webber is raised by his Aunt Maw, who has inherited responsibility for him
following the desertion of his father , John Webber, and the death of his
mother, Amelia- -Aunt Maw's younger sister. On first blush, Wolfe's charac-ters,
situations, and settings seem to have been transformed; but he was,
in fact, still mining the quarry of memories as Edward Aswell, the editor
of his posthumous novels noted:
Having abandoned Eugene Gant, he went back and re-created a new
childhood for George Webber, working in the things he had for­gotten
when he wrote Look Homeward, Angel as well as a few of
the things that had been cut from that book.l50
Floyd Watkins observed that, in The Web and the Rock, Wolfe added at least
sixty-four characters from both memory and imagination which he had not
used before". ' Wolfe inevitably returned to the fountainhead of memory and
experience which had served him so well in Look Homewarq Angel.
The Old Kentucky Home was of course the locale of various events which
formed milestones in the life of the Wolfe family. On September 16, 1908
Effie was married, in a very grand style, to Fred Gambrell of Anderson,
South Carolina, in the large dining room downstairs.152 rt was at the Old
Kentucky Home that Frank met and seduced his future wife, the asthmatic
Margaret Dietz, who had come to Asheville for her health from New Albany,
Indiana. 153 On the evening of June 28, 1916 Mabel Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton
were joined in conjugal union in a plush ceremony in the dining room, des-cribed
in the newspaper account as "the west parlor of the commodious
res1".d e nce. 11154
On the evening of October 19, 1918 occurred in the house the death of
Ben, of all Wolfe's siblings the one to whom he felt closest. It was not
only in Look Homeward, Angel that the death of his favorite brother proved
a shattering and pivotal event in his life. Nearly a decade later, in a
letter to his mother, Wolfe reflected the significance of his loss:
Life dropped one of its big shells on us and blew us apart.
Life at home practically ceased to be possible for me. when
Ben died.lSS
Ben had grown ill in the pitiably small and austere room upstairs with the
small sleeping porch. Subsequently he was moved for warmth and comfort
into the larger adjoining room on the northeast corner of the house:
• the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay­window.
It was next to the sleeping-porch where, but three weeks
before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. 156
The death scene which Thomas Wolfe would later describe--one of the great
scenes in all of literature--would be drawn from the sorrow and bitterness
157 of a very personal loss. Like W. 0., Julia, and Tom, who would follow
him at length, Ben "lay in the parlor bedded in his expensive coffin,"
158 against the wall on the right as one enters from the hall.
Four years later, on June 20, 1922, after many years of wretched and
hopeless combat with a rampant cancer, W. 0. Wolfe was to die in the down-
40
stairs back bedroom of the house which had so often been the object of his
eloquent invective. 159 The man who had once bestrode his small we~ld like a
reeling colossus, had in his declining years become an emaciated and self-pitying
old man. For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old
Kentucky Home, W. 0. Wolfe had resolutely continued to make his home on
Woodfin Street, despite the gnawing progress that cancer was maktng within
him during his last years there. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
indicated that his father's final move into the Old Kentucky Home. came
160 during the summer of 1917. This is corroborated by a letter of July 9,
161 1917 from W. 0. Wolfe to his son Ben. Mabel and Ralph Wheaton contin-ued
to live in the Woodfin Street house, and were accepting roomers there
in 1917 and 1918 . 162 As W. 0. Wolfe drew out his death on Spruce Street,
his home on Woodfin Street and his shop on Pack Square were sold in quick
succession. On April 24, 1920 the house was sold to one J . R. Durrett of
163 Marion County, Kentucky for $6,500 . Little more than a week later, on
41
164
May 3, 1920, the monument shop was sold to a Philip R. Moale for $25,000.
The two structures around which W. 0 . Wolfe's life had revolved for nearly
four decades were no longer so much as a part of it. 165 On May 22, 1920
Fred wrote a letter to Tom at Chapel Hi.ll, in which was reflected a mutual
resentment and melancholy toward what had happened:
I suppose that you are acquainted with the sale of the Woodfin
property and the Wolfe Building. As to what our personal opin­ions
are - regarding either - now is no time to cry over spilt
milk. I had nothing to do with either deal, nor was my advice
asked. I would suggest that nothing be said to worry Papa, he
was not the power behind the throne in the sales . My main hope
is - that he will be made comfortable for the remainder of his
days (long or short?) on Spruce St. l66
During the late winter of 1919-1920 the furniture in the Woodfin Street
167 house was moved into the Old Kentucky Home .
The house into which W. 0. Wolfe finally and reluctantly moved in 1917
was essentially as it is today. When Mrs. Wolfe bought the house in August
of 1906 it was probably very much as it had been since the massive additions
of 1885-1889. Thomas Wolfe best describes the overall appearance of the
house at the time of his mother's purchase:
It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant
sloping middleclass street of small houses and boarding houses.
Dixieland was a big , cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen
or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplan­ned,
gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a
pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row
of young deepbodied maples: there was a sloping depth of
one hundred and ninety feet , a frontage of one hundred and
twenty.l68
For ten years after Mrs. Wolfe•s purchase the house remained virtually
unchanged, but in 1916 she undertook a substantial enlargement in order
169 to accomodate a larger share of the tourist trade:
Meanwhile, business had been fairly good . Eliza's earning
power for the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by
her illnesses . Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off
the last installment on the house. It was entirely hers. The
property at this time was worth perhaps $12,000. In addition she
had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty year $5,000 life insurance policy
that had only two years more to run, and had made extensive alter­ations:
she had added a large sleeping porch upstairs, tacked on
two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and two baths, and
a watercloset, on the other . Downstairs she had widened the veranda,
put in a large sun- parlor under the sleeping porch, knocked out the
archway in the dining room, which she prepared to use as a big bed­room
in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the
family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her
own occupancy.
The construction was a.fter her own plans, and of the cheapest
material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and
flimsy rough plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at
a cost of only $3 , 000.170
The venerable hot - air furnace wlrlch had groaned and faltered under the
burden of heating the house before the additions, had no prayer of doing
so now . The rooms which had been added onto the back of the house upstairs
and the sleeping porch at the head of the stairs were heated by small wood
and coal stoves which opened into flues . In the early 1920s the old
furnace gave up the ghost entirely, and stoves and heaters were installed
in other rooms of the house. 171
Since 1916 the appearance of the house has changed little if at all,
except for an occasional change in color . Wolfe's description of the house
as painted a "dirty yellow'' was probably accurate for the entire period
depicted in Look Homeward, .Angel. .An undated hand-colored postcard shows
the house (being operated as the Colonial) as it appeared prior to 1916.
42
in April of 1921 W. 0. Wolfe wrote his son at Harvard of a recent change in
the appearance of the house: '~ou could not recognize the O.K.H. which is
newley [sic] painted cream body and chocklate [sic] trim."172 The house
has been white since at least the early 1950s and may have been so since
the late 1930s or early 1940s.
43
I have been unable to discover exactly how the house was furnished at
the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase. It seems probable that some of the Rev­erend
Myer's furnishings remained in the house when ownership changed. The
older of the two pianos and the formidable wood range in the kitchen are
known to have been in the house prior to 1906. 173 Because Mrs. Wolfe in­herited
nineteen boarders with the purchase of the house, it is likely that
much or all of the furniture in their rooms would have been left undisturbed .
Doubtless some furniture was brought up from Woodfin Street in 1906 and from
time to time thereafter. More would have come with W. 0. Wolfe during his
move in 1917. But until near the sale of the Woodfin Street house, there
was a need to leave adequate furnishings in the original house to maintain
a separate household. Finally, at the time of the sale of the Woodfin
Street house, the balance of its furnishings were moved into the Old
174 Kentucky Home.
For as long as Mrs. Wolfe operated the Old Kentucky Home as a board~g
house, the hub of activity was in the dining room. During the period of
Wolfe's youth depicted in Look Homeward, Angel there were four large tables
in the dining room, each with a capacity for eight to ten people. Near the
door stood the family table where boarders "of long standing" were some-times
invited to sit. After the additions in 1916 the family members
seemed to have been shunted off into the small pantry near the dining
room. Meals were served in four separate sets of dishes, so that each
44
of the tables was sufficient unto itsel£ . 175 During the salad days of the
boarding house operation, Mrs. Wolfe received a weekly remuneration from her
guests of seven or eight dollars. In addition to cooking for her regular
boarders, Mrs. Wolfe also served meals to outside guests or drop- ins, who
purchased their meals at prices ranging from 25¢ for breakfast to SO¢ for
176 Sunday dinner. In the early period much of the produce needed for the
Old Kentucky Home kitchen was supplied by the vegetable garden and fruit
trees at Woodfin Street. Mrs. Wolfe continued to raise smaller quantities
of vegetables and white grapes at the Old Kentucky Home until her last
days . 177 Mabel Wolfe Wheaton's recollection was that 'we had soup 365
days of the year" and that her mother charged eight to ten dollars a week
for room and board. 178 By the very early 1920s or before, when Mrs. Wolfe
gave up the boarding house business and began to keep roomers only, the
dining room was converted into a large bedroom. Look Homeward, Angel dates
179 the closing of the dining room as early as the death of Ben in 1918.
In the declining years of the Old Kentucky Home, the dining room fell into
desuetude and served only as storage space. 180
The Old Kentucky Home was operated under several proprietors during
the period of Wolfe ' s youth. Mrs . Wolfe very often took extended trips
during the slack winter months and occasionally at other times of the year.
During these periods of her absence the Old Kentucky Home was leased out to
others and was occasional ly operated under another name. According to
Mabel Wolfe Wheaton the house was being operated as the Colonial in 1910
by Mrs. 0 . L. Neville . 181 If this is true, the colored post card earlier
referred to can be dated accordingly. But the situation of 1910 is ren-dered
problematical by the City Directory of that year, which at once,
45
places Olive Neville and the Colonial at 29 Flint Street, states that the
Old Kentucky Home is being operated as a boarding house at 48 Spruce Street,
that the house at 48 Spruce Street is vacant, and that Mrs. Julia Wolfe is
idin 92 T.T dfin S i h the rest of the f.,.,...;ly ·. 182
res g at noo treet w t ~ In 1916 the
house was operated by M. M. and Catherine D. Castillo as the Richmond.
183
Probably there we re other proprietors and other names under which
the house was operated during Mrs. Wolfe's absence. Upon her return,
however, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have repossessed her boarding house with a
vengeance from her hapless tenants :
In the winter now, she rented Dixieland for a few months, some­times
for a year, although she really had no intention of allowing
the place to slip through her fingers during the profitable summer
season: usually she let the place go, more or less deliberately,
to some unscrupulous adventuress of lodging houses, good for a
month's or two months• rent, but incapable of the sustained effort
that would support it for a longer time. On her return from her
journey, with rents in arrears, or with some other violation of
the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would surge triumphantly
into battle, making a forced entrance with police, plain-clothes
men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all the artillery
of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly and with vindictive
pleasure, of her property.l84
Mrs . Wolfe followed a gruelling and hectic regimen in operating the
Old Kentucky Home, especially before closing the dining room. Wolfe would
later describe her compulsive toil as beginning before seven in the morning
and extending often until two o'clock the following morning. 185 In the
early years Mrs. Wolfe passed her fleeting hours of sleep in the front
bedroom downstairs with the bay window. Later, following the additions of
1916, she moved into the small bedroom at the rear of the house just off the
k •t h 186 ~ c en. Before 1920 and Wolfe's departure for Harvard, Mrs. Wolfe had
delegated much of the everyday operations of the house to a '~ss Newton,
a wrenny and neurotic old maid with asthma ••• [who] had gradually become
Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of the house,'' while she
devoted more and more of her time and energies to her proliferating real
estate speculations. 187
During the years of Wolfe's youth, North Spruce Street was a neighbor-hood
of private residences and several boarding houses. The Dixie, the
Colonial, the Elton, the Belvidere, and the ~elmont, their various pro-prietors,
and some of their boarders would have been among his recollec-tions
of the Spruce Street neighborhood (see Appendix G). An examination
of the city directories indicates that North Spruce Street was emerging as
a boarding house street as early as the 1890s. By the time of which Wolfe
wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, this development had made considerable head-way.
Across the street from the Old Kentucky Home and to the left, at 57
North Spruce, stood the Belmont (later the Belvidere), which Wolfe refers
to as "The Brunswick," According to Look Homeward, Angel, W. 0. Wolfe had
participated in the construction of this house, and later had refused his
wife's entreaties to collaborate 188 in its purchase. Wolfe also wrote of
"The Brunswick" that one of his few childhood friends on Spruce Street was
46
the son of its proprietor in 1910 (see Appendix G), and that its ravenous
guests were summoned to table by means of a Japanese gong. 189 Other boarding
houses in the near vicinity stood along Woodfin Street, North Main, and
College Streets, with names like Wyckoff Hall, the Lisbon, and the Ozark.
Wolfe grew up surrounded by these and other boarding houses and doubtless
was acquainted with many of the women who toiled within them. 190
During the years before Wolfe's departure for the University of North
Carolina, Spruce Street was experiencing a rapid turnover in residents. A
comparison of the City Directories for 1900, ·1906; 1910, and 1916 reveals
that a very low proportion of those dwelling on the street were permanently
settled. Of twenty individual residents listed in 1900, only six remained
47
in 1906. Of seventeen residents listed in 1906, only seven r emained in 1910.
And of twenty-one residents in 1910 , only six remained in 1916 , the year of
191 Wolfe's departure for Chapel Hill. These directories also reveal the
beginnings of an insidious encroachment by the commercial district onto the
street in the wake of Asheville's accelerated growth, and encroachment which
would at length comp l etely alter and disfigure the neighborhood.
The changes which were occurr ing in the surroundings of the Old Kentucky
Home during Wolfe ' s late pre-college years reflected changes which were
taking place in the city as a whole. Wolfe, himself, was deeply disturbed
by the heedlessly rapid growth and elemental transformations which were
taking place in Ashevil le during the first three decades of this century.
In the year of Wo l fe's birth Asheville had been a small town of 14,694
residents. By 1910 a slow growth had increased the population only to
18 , 762. But the city's growth had then begun to snowball; by 1 920 the
population had reached 28,504,and by 1930 had soared to 50,193. In the
wake of local and nationwide financial disasters, the momentum was then
l ost; during the decade of the 1930s the population increased only to
51,310. 192
The foundations of economic disaster in Asheville were alr eady well
laid before the Great Depression struck . Beginning about 1923 Wolfe began
to evince a marked repugnancy toward the shallow commer cial ism and grasping
materialism which was transforming Asheville almost beyond recognition. By
1926, Buncombe County , in the thrilling throes of a land boom, led the state
in the assessed value of its real est ate. The f ollowing year the crash
came. Asheville was financially devastated, and many of its leading cit i -
193 zens completely wiped out. Subsequent disasters befell the already
stricken city in 1929 and 1930 in the form of widespread bank failures and
•
the consequent bankrupt cy and ignom.inious col lapse of local government.
Four years after the publication of Look Homewa r d, Angel, in a letter to
his mother, Wolfe summed up his feelings toward what had happened in
Asheville:
I dislike the whole booster ~boom-town-country club whoop~it-up
kind of spirit because the whole thing is a lie and there is
not a single decent and honest human value in it and everybody
knows it .. • •
• • • • • • • • • • • • II; • • • • • •
I agree with you that it seems hard to see any immediate
hope for Asheville. They invested their whole lives in a toy
balloon and when the balloon burst, there was nothing left,
not even the wind they pumped into it.l94
To its most famous son, the fortunes of Asheville were never matters of
indifference. Throughout his career the city loomed prominently in his
195 thoughts and had continuing impact on his work. Fo l lowing two novels
almost entirely concerned with the larger world into which he had escaped
48
as a young man, it is significant that, with his last and uncompleted novel,
The Hills Beyond, Wolfe was returning, for subject matter, to the mountains
and people from which he had sprung.
By the time of Wolfe ' s departure for Harvard, the Old Kentucky Home
had seen its best days. Like the neighborhood of which it was a part, it
bad entered upon a protracted decline. After her initial trip to southern
Florida in January of 1923, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have devoted very little
time to the dwindling numbers of winter guests , Increasingly she was titil-lated
by the glo~ing potentials of real estate speculation in Miami and
Miami Beach, and thereafter repaired southward almost annually, drawn by
the combined inducements of warmer weather and the chance of fabulous wealth.
For many years she contemplated the construction of a modern apartment build­ing
in Miami, both as a sound investment and as a permanent resi.dence. 19b
Needless to say this recurring scheme never materialized, and the Old Ken-
•
tucky Home suffered a decline in business due to patterns of -Asheville's
development, local and national economic conditions, and the side effects
of two world wars.
During the erstwhile peak of the tourist season, in early July of
1917, W. 0. Wolfe wrote Ben that there were only eight boarders at the
Old Kentucky Home, due primarily to World War 1. 197 Two weeks later the
number of guests had risen to eighteen or twenty, but W. 0. Wolfe continued
to forecast a bleak tourist season. 198 In June of 1931 Fred wrote Tom
that there were only three or four in the house, and that their mother "so
far has had scarecly [sic] any one this year."199 Just before Christmas
of the same year, Mrs. Wolfe, in a letter to Tom, complained that well-to-do
winter travelers would no longer suffer the infamous chill of the Old
Kentucky Home, and that they were seeking more modern accomodations with
steam heat. Consequently she was being left with an increasingly indigent
and shiftless clientele, many of whom were out of work and able to pay
little or nothing for their rooms. 200 In March of 1932 Mrs. Wolfe reported
that there were no roomers in the house, that the place needed painting,
201 that the roof was leaking, and that some of the plumbing had burst. Her
letter of two months later must have roused unpleasant memories of "drum-ming
up trade" within her son's breast, as it exhorted him to promote
mountain trips among his New York friends and promised an ample supply
of Chamber of Commerce brochures to aid him in his endeavors. 202
By May of 1933 Mrs. Wolfe's business had grown so bad that she was
accepting for 50¢ a night undesirable roomers whom in better days she would
203 have turned away. During the mid 1930s the Old Kentucky Home was no
49
longer bringing in sufficient money to cover the cost of heat and utilities,
and Fred was having to contribute what he could to the upkeep of the house. 204
•
Mrs. Wolfe recognized that during the financial boom of the early and mid
1920s Asheville bad begun to change in such a way as to place Spruce Street
outside the normal lines of travel, and that the relentless transition of
Spruce Street fromaresidential to a commercial area had rendered the
surroundings less and less inviting to potential guests.
By the winter of 1938 Mrs. Wolfe had begun to sleep on a bed in the
parlor in an effort to keep warm in the delapidated and ill-maintained
structure:
I feel the cold but I dress like an Eskimo, to keep from suf­fering,
but can ' t get any work done for I have to stay close
to the fire here in the living room, even sleep here. This
house was built for summer boarding house, now old, obsolete-­could
not be made comfortable besides [it] would cost more than
to build a modern house.205
During the year just prior to his death, Wolfe described the Old Kentucky
Home and his mother's attachment to it in a letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts,
who had inquired whether two young visitors to Asheville might not stay
there :
As for Mama~s house, there is certainly room there, but it
is frankly in a delapidated state--an old house in a state
of disrepair, which has long since passed its palmy days.
Of course it is Mama ' s house and she loves it and sees it
with a different eye, but these are the facts and I don't
know whether it would be advisable for the young people to
stay there or not.206
A constant and o:(ttimes solitary roomer at the Old Kentucky Home from
1922 to 1933 was the shadowy Theodore ("Ted") Salmer, a mild , softspoken,
shabby, pitiable, and alcoholic man, who for eleven years helped look
after things in the house, provided companionship for Mrs. Wolfe, and
finally died at her feet of a massive hemorrhage one Sunday morning in
207 November of 1933. Family letters from the 1920s and earl y 1930s
sometimes mention that "Old Salmer" has been left in charge of the house
50
51
during Mrs. Wolfe ' s absence or that he is currently the only roomer in
the house. Fred Wolfe recal ls him fondly, and remembers that Mrs. Wolfe
allowed Salmer to stay in the house for little or no payment. 208 Salmer
appears fleetingly as "Gilmer" in Wolfe's story "The Return of the Prodi-
1 11ga . 209 Indeed, Wolfe's notebook for early 1934 reveals that he was
contemplating, but never completed, an entire short story built around a
210
roomer at the Old Kentucky Home whom he planned to call "Gilmer."
Upon hearing of Salmer's death, Wolfe wrote his mother in commiseration:
A postcard from Mabel this morning informed me that Mr.
Salmer died Sunday and that you were with him when he died .
I know what a sad thing this must be for you and that you have
lost a good friend . All of us I know feel sad about it because
we all liked him. 211
Between 1917 and 1925 North Market Street was cut through behind the
Old Kentucky Home, between North Main and North Spruce Streets, as the in-cursions
of the downtown commercial district into the neighborhood con-tinued
apace. As early as 1922 city planners envisioned drastic changes
in the formerly residential section of which the Old Kentucky Home was a
part. A comprehensive proposal of that year for Asheville ' s future devel-opment
called for the establishment of a civic center to the north of Col-lege
Street, between Spruce and Oak Streets, which was to contain a post
office, a library, a federal building, and a community center. The proposed
plan of development pointed out that the Spruce Street area was in close
proximity to Pack Square, that it was outside the normal flows of traffic,
that it was not yet highly developed, that it should be inexpensive to pro-
cure, and that it was a suitable location for a large downtown hotel. 212
By 1930 the once residential North Spruce Street boasted a tire company,
two automotive electrical shops, one new car dealer, two used car lots, two
garages, and two funeral homes . To the rear and north of the Old Kentucky
•
Home, at the corner of North Market and Woodfin Streets, the Asheville­Biltmore
Hotel had risen. 213 Of special significance in the subsequent
history of the Old Kentucky Home was to be the erection of Harry's Motor
Inn directly to its rear. On December 21, 1926 Harry D. Blomberg signed
an agreement with Mrs. Wolfe to lease the Old Kentucky Home property be-tween
the back of the house and North Market Street and to build upon it
214 a large one-story garage, subject to her approval of the plans . Blom-berg
would later play a crucial role with regard to the house, and the
unsightly garage which he constructed still stands pressed snugly against
its backside. The trend of the neighborhood downward, once begun, was
never reversed.
Scattered brief descriptions of the house after the neighborhood's
decline can be gleaned from several sources. In 1935 G. E. Dean,
writing for The State, rendered the following description:
It is the same rambling, unplanned, added-to, gabular affair
with 18 or 20 rooms and painted on the outside a dirty yellow
as described in the novel Look Homeward, Angel . But about it
now there is something of a semblance of a dusty museum which
never fails to fascinate readers who delight in seeing the
book come to life.215
Dean noted the presence of numerous photographs in the parlor and the piano
on the sun porch, over which were hung two of Thomas Wolfe's diplomas. 216
Another description dating from 1935 described the neighborhood as "shabby
and non-descript." The house was said to have a "Tourists" sign on the
front lawn, a faded "Old Kentucky Rome" sign over the front door, and to
have "recently been painted a somewhat startling shade of yellow. " The
parlor was reported to have a red carpet and lace curtains . A marble-top
table held copies of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and
the walls were "decorated with innumerable photographs, and Tom's college
52
53
217 diplomas. " In August of 1940 a visitor noted that Mrs . Wolfe was taking
roomers at $1.00 a day. The front yard was said to be grassless, flowerless~
and broom- swept . The house badly wanted paint and its overall appearance
was one of "a cheap boarding house ." In the parlor were easy chairs and a
davenport. An upright piano stood diagonally across one corner of the
room and atop the piano was a photograph of Tom . Two enlarged tintypes of
the twins, Grover and Ben , adorned one wall of the parlor. On the sunporch
broken window panes had been replaced with newspapers . The central light
fixture of the sun parlor was socketed for six bulbs but contained only two.
The second of the two upright pianos stood diagonally across one corner of
the sun parlor. In addition, the sun parlor contained a mission oak daven-port,
a windowseat with cushions, and a table with potted plants. The over-all
impression of the house was one of loneliness and bleakness , yet this
writer was told by a Florida couple currently staying there that Mrs. Wolfe
218 "runs the cleanest boarding house in Asheville."
Through the years Mrs. Wolfe clung to the old boarding house, which was
drawing increasing numbers of visitors, if not roomers, as her son ' s novels
gained increasing audiences. Ironically, the growth of public interest in
Mrs. Wolfe and the Old Kentucky Home developed against a background of finan-ci
al and legal reverses of a most serious aspect--reverses which would
finally result in bankruptcy and loss of the house at public auction. The
financial and legal odyssey which resulted at length in Mrs. Wolfe ' s loss of
the Old Kentucky Home would be tedious to relate in every detail. Its even-tual
loss was preceded and surrounded by labyrinthine legal and fina ncial
entanglements which are extremely difficult to fully unravel and which as
yet have received little or no attention, It is hoped that the following
account of this tmportant episode in the history of the house ~1 steer a
middle course between excessive brevity and unendurable tedium. 219
On October 17, 1922, some four months after the death of W. 0.
Wolfe, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton were duly qualified as executors
of his will and were entered upon the administration of his estate.
They were empowered by provisions of the will to disperse $5,000 each
to Effie , Frank, Mabel, Fred, and Tom, after which the balance of the
estate was to devolve upon Mrs. Wolfe. Soon after the issuance of their
letters testamentary, however, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton became in­active
as executors, having only partially satisfied the provisions of
the will. After remaining inactive until 1937, their letters were re-voked
and the further administration of the W. 0. Wolfe estate was placed
in the hands of S. J. Pegram by order of the clerk of Buncombe Superior
Court. Soon after the death of W. 0. Wolfe, however, in the absence of
54
an on- going administration of the estate by its executors, Mrs. Wolfe had,
in practice, taken control over her husband's estate , buying, sell ing, and
investing freely, upon the mistaken assumption of her legal right to do so
under the provisions of the will. There had followed numerous financial and
property transactions on the part of Mrs . Wolfe, principally in Asheville
and Miami, as she speculated wildly on the crest of real estate booms in
both areas. By the summer of 1927 Mrs. Wolfe had overextended herself
and felt that her financial affairs had grown too sizable and complex for
her continued personal management. Moreover, the real estate bubbles in
both Asheville and Miami had burst, and she had encumbered many of her
holdings to such an extent that they were in imminent danger of fore­closure
for debt.
On June 10, 1927 Mrs. Wolfe entered into an irrevocable ''Living Trust"
agreement with Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, whereby she vir tually sur-
55
220 rendered all personal control of her financial affairs. Thenceforward
she exercised the power neither to loose nor bind those monies and proper-ties
attached to the corpus of the trust estate by the original and supple-mental
agreements . On June 14, 1927 the Old Kentucky Home was joined to
the corpus of the agreement, thereby relinquishing control of the house
which, even then, her son was in the process of immortalizing as he wrote
221 Look Homeward, Angel. There followed a complex and confusing series of
deeds in trust, promissory notes, and loans which further complicated the
legal ties which bound the Old Kentucky Home to Mrs. Wolfe's agreements
with Wachovia. By January of 1937 the old boarding house (referred to in
the various financial and legal documents as the "First lot") was heavily
encumbered by four substantialmortgages and a lien against the house for
222 unpaid taxes.
At length Mrs . Wolfe ' s failure to maintain the payment of her crushing
indebtedness and her non-payment of city and county taxes over a number
of years, for which Wachovia assumed responsibility as trustee, resulted in
the issuance of a summons by Wachovia on January 4, 1937 against Mrs. Wolfe,
the Wolfe children and their spouses, various city and county officials,
private individuals with separate liens against Wolfe properties, Wachovia
223 Bank and Trust Company, Trustee, and, subsequently, against S. J. Pegram
as administrator of the W. 0. Wolfe estate.
From June 10, 1927 to March 1, 1937 the trust estate had realized f rom
rents, notes, real estate sales, and miscellaneous sources $115,707 . 42 in
income . Over the same period, however, the total disbursements necessary
for the maintenance of the estate had totaled $138,169.11, so that the
estate was deeply in debt to Wachovia as trustee. In addition, the estate
was encumbered by unpaid liab:tli.ti.es of $126,663 . 66 composed of debts in-
curred, interest due, and unpaid commissions. At the time the suit
was initiated, Wachovia estimated the rental value of the Old Kentucky
Rome, "a very old residence," to be no more than $50.00 a month. In
early 1938 the court appointed referee was to gauge the value of the
house and lot at $26,100. The Old Kentucky Home and seven other of
Mrs. Wolfe's properties, six of which were unimproved, were the sole
assets remaining to the estate, and Wachovia had brought the action after
concluding that the estate's excess of liabilities over assets could only
be expected to worsen.
The Wolfes argued, in their answer to Wachovia's complaint and in
several subsequent countersuits, that Wachovia had grossly underestimated
the value of the estate's remaining assets and its original value, that
Wachovia and Mrs. Wolfe had violated the provisions of W. 0. Wolfe's will,
and had attacked the interests of his heirs by entering into the trust
agreement in the first place, that Mrs. Wolfe had been unduly hastened
and cajoled into making the agreement without being sufficiently informed
of its consequences, and that the estate had been managed negligently and
unskillfully, while wise advice and lucrative opportunities had gone
begging. As a culmination of their contercharges, the Wolfes alleged
that they were entitled to $150,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000
in punitive damages from Wachovia for its "gross and willful negligence''
and mismanagement.
Following a series of legal maneuvers on both sides, the cause was
referred to George A. Shuford, Referee, by order of Buncombe Superior
Court Judge A. Hall Johnston on December 16, 1937 . Shuford began to hear
evidence of January 31, 1938 and finally submitted his report on December
56
57
21 of that year. In his report Shuford concluded that the trust agreement
had become "impossible of fulfillment" and that the estate was " totally
insolvent. " He further found that the estate of W. 0. Wolfe had no viable
interest in the litigat ion, that the Wolfe children and their spouses were
not legitimate parties therein, and that Wachovia was entitled to sell the
remaining assets of the estate for recovery of Mrs . Wolfe's defaulted debts.
Shuford's original findings of fact and conclusions of law were appeal­led
by the Wolfes, and the cause was referred to him a second t±me on Janu­ary
19 , 1939 by Buncombe Superior Court Judge J. Will Pless, Jr . Referee
Shuford ' s final report of January 28, 1939 was amended only slightly , in
part to adjust its findings and concl usions to the Wolfe ' s counterclaims.
As in his original report, Shuford found against the Wolfes on virtually
every item of Wachovia ' s complaint. Furthermore, he exonerated the corpo­ration
from any all egat ions of negligence or wrongdoing and declared the
Wolfe's counterclaim to have no merit in law. The Wolfes ' counterclaim
was subsequently dismissed by Judge Pless on June 16, 1939. On August 17,
1939 Judge J. A. Rousseau of Buncombe Superior Court , following a jury
verdict against the Wolfes, handed down a decision in favor of Wachovia
which in effect accepted and confirmed Referee Shuford's reports.
In his Judgement and Decree Judge Rousseau ordered Mrs. Wolfe to pay
Wachovia the enormous sums due them by August 31. Failing that, Reed
Kitchen was appointed commissioner with the authority to sell separately
her encumbe r ed properties at the door of courthouse on behalf of the
plaintiff creditor, Wachovia, which was to be permitted to participate
in the bidding . In the event , Mrs. Wolfe proved unable to repay her
onerous debts . There were no means at hand to save the Old Kentucky
Home from the auctioneer~s gavel, and, on Monday, October 2, 1939, at
•
high noon, the old boarding house was sold to Wachovia Bank and Trust
224 Company for a total price of $32,876.65.
The grueling and protracted legal battle and Mrs. Wolfe's eventual
loss of the house involved the children in varying degrees. Almost cer-tainly
there was some festering resentment against their mother for having
squandered a portion of the inheritance due them from their father's
estate. On the whole, however, the children were bound together in sym-pathy
for their mother and in resentment of Wachovia and the "Living
Trust." A number of letters between family members from the late 1930s
convey this impression . As on most occasions, Fred was most unequivocal
in his analysis of the situation, as evinced in his explanation of the
"Living Trust" agreement to Tom:
It is a very insidious and insecure and one-sided Hellish
instrument which gave them full power to act and destroy
and dissipate the entire estate. • All hers and our
interests due to their mishandling and squandering of the
estate have been destroyed. Their suit also pleads for
recovery of Old Kentucky Home property street to street
including Harry' s Motor Inn . Mama is holding due to occu­pancy
of the premises, and can be evicted by court action
based on the outcome of the suit.
I started the thing since they were suing us and mama and will
see it through, come what may, as we either fight back or else
let them kick mamma out. 225
As early as February 15, 1937 Wolfe was expressing concern over the
bank suit in a letter to his mother:
Fred spoke to me in his letter of trouble which Wachovia
Bank is now making for you concerning the house on Spruce
Street. • • • Fred didn't tell me much about the Wachovia
trouble, but I wish when you get time, some of you would
write and tell me about it.226
By April 28, 1937, largely as a result of the law suit, he was beginning
to weigh whether he should end his self-banishment from Asheville:
I want to come down to see you and talk to you and find
out what this Wachovia Bank business is all about . If there
is anyway I can help, I want to do so.
58
It will be a very strange experience , I think,
coming back to Asheville after all these years.227
59
In any event, Wolfe's concern and curiosity over the bank suit and
the possible loss of the Old Kentucky Home proved important factors in
his decision to return to Asheville in May of 1937~ after nearly eight
228 years of voluntary exile. On May 3, 1937 Wolfe stole silently into
town and made his way to 48 Spruce Street. At the time of his arrival,
his mother's legally imperiled boarding house boasted but a single
229 roomer, a school teacher .
The prodigal novelist's return to Asheville was both successful and
reassuring. So pleased and relieved was Wolfe by his hometown's reception
in May that he resolved to spend the summer there following a brief return
to New York. Raving arranged to rent a secluded cabin at Oteen from
c artoonist, Max Whitson, Wolfe returned to Asheville from New York in
1 J 1
230 ear y u y. The summer proved a disastrous mistake . Wolfe had hoped
to see his family and a few old friends, to get some writing done, to
enjoy the peaceful privacy of the cabin, and to commune once again with
the mountain surroundings he had loved since childhood. Instead the
summer became a series of unending disturbances, uninvited visitors,
phone calls, questions, autographs, notoriety, and family discord. At
the Old Kentucky Home Tom and Frank clashed almost as soon as they met .
Wolfe found the atmosphere of his mother's home so strained that he spent
more time at Mabel's residence than on Spruce Street, thus exacerbating
the anci~nt jealousy between sister and mother. The reunion of the volatile
family members once again under the same roof produced a chain of small ex-
231 plosions which Wolfe found unpleasant and vexing in the utmost degree.
Weary of the constant disturbances at the Oteen cabin , Wolfe moved secretly
into the Battery Park Hotel in late August, in hopes of securing rest
and so1 1. .tud e. 232 A few days prior to his final departure from Asheville,
Wolfe moved into his mother's house on Spruce Street. 233 The last night
Wolfe ever spent in the Old Kentucky Home must have been the night of
September 4, 1937. He left for New York, never to see Asheville again,
on the following day. 234
The summer in Asheville had been anything but pleasant. While Wolfe
had been relieved to find the old animosities over Look Homeward, Angel
subsided, the visit had proven extremely taxing physically, psychologi-cally,
and emotionally. Old family wounds had been reopened, especially
between himself and Frank, and Wolfe had resolved not to return to Ashe-ville
. The bitter feelings he harbored on the subject of his homecoming
were reflected in a letter to Fred:
About the summer I spent at home, my first return in seven
years or more, the less said the better. I'd like to forget about
it if I could. I went home a very tired man, not only with all
this trouble of Scribner's gnawing, but the pressure and accumu­lation
of everything that has happened in the past two years .
And when I left home I was as near to a breakdown as I have
ever been. • • .
It's too bad things had to turn out the way they did this
summer: I had hoped that things would have changed: I had been
away so long that I thought maybe they would be different. But
I found out they were just the same, only worse: So I guess that's
the end of me in Asheville. I'm sorry that you felt that I did not
go around to the house enough this summer. I went all I could, but
the situation there was such that I could not have gone more often
than I did. • • • I have something in me that some people value,
that has given some people happiness and pleasure, and that people
think is worth saving. I think so too, and that is why I'm going
to try to save it .
I'm willing to do anything I can to help any one of my own
kin in any way I can, but I'm not willing to waste my life and
talent in an atmosphere of ruin and defeat, among people who can't
be helped and who have been so defeated that they hate everything
in life that has not been, and want to drag it down. I'm sorry to
have to talk this way, but I have been driven to it. I've felt
pretty sick and sore at heart when [sic, since] I left home, as it 235 has been so sad and so different from what I had hoped it would be.
60
61
Tragically, Wolfe would not long be able to save that "something" in
him which had "given some people happiness and pleasure. " In little more
than a year after his departure from Asheville, his life would be prematurely
extinguished by miliary tuberculosis of the brain, in the thirty-seventh year
of his age. Wolfe grew gravely ill in the mid summer of 1938, following
his "Western Journey"--an extensive and grueling two-week sweep through
the national parks of the western United States by automobile from June 21
to July 1. As he lay sick in Seattle, Washington, he was joined first by
Fred and then by Mabel,